Female icons to headline Outside Lands festival.
Janet Jackson, Florence + the Machine will headline
After taking persistent knocks for its lack of female headliners, in its 11th year the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival offers two.
Janet Jackson and Florence + the Machine, alongside the Weeknd, will top the bill for the annual three-day concert in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park from Aug. 10 to 12.
“They’re both female pop icons, but on different ends of the spectrum,” said Allen Scott, vice president of Another Planet Entertainment, which co-produces the festival with Superfly and Starr Hill Presents.
The lineup, which was revealed on Tuesday, April 3, also features some 100 other acts, including Future, Beck, Odesza, Carly Rae Jepsen, Bon Iver, DJ Snake, N.E.R.D., Chvrches, James Blake and Margo Price, performing across stages on the Polo Field, Hellman Hollow, Speedway and Marx Meadows.
Scott said that the promoters secured Florence + the Machine as a headliner for Outside Lands back in 2015, when the British act fronted by Florence Welch performed
at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. The group, which performed at Wine Country’s outdoor music and food festival BottleRock Napa Valley 2016, wanted to wait until it had new material to play (its fourth, as-yet-untitled studio album is expected this year).
Jackson’s representatives, meanwhile, reached out to Another Planet directly, Scott said.
“She asked to play the festival, and we jumped at that,” he said. “It’s not somebody we had considered before.”
Another Planet Entertainment started dropping clues about this year’s lineup via its Twitter handle @sfoutsidelands on Thursday, March 29 — the day presale tickets, priced between $325 and $749.50 each, sold out. Three-day tickets for the festival go on sale at 10 a.m. Thursday, April 5, via www.sfoutside lands.com.
Each clue featured a corner of album cover art, with the first one revealing Portugal. The Man, while subsequent posts included Mac DeMarco, Huey Lewis & the News, Jessie Ware, Big Gigantic, Børns and the Vallejo hip-hop outfit SOB x RBE.
“We wanted to create a lineup that is really well-rounded and speaks to what people are listening to now. We didn’t just want three big names on the top,” Scott said. “We look at it from every level and always strive to build a unique festival. That becomes harder and harder with the proliferation of music festivals.”
Before making Outside Lands history, Jackson and Florence + the Machine will also serve as headliners for FYF Fest, which takes place in July in Los Angeles. That festival is produced by Goldenvoice, which also brings the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival to the Southern California desert every year.
“It’s very difficult to have an exclusive headliner in this day and age,” Scott said. “There are so many festivals and only a limited number of headliners.”
He added that Outside Lands, which draws some 210,000 people, has actively worked to achieve gender parity in its lineup — an area where several major music festivals, including Coachella and Lollapalooza, are falling short.
According to a 2015 Nielsen report, 32 million people attend a music festival in the U.S. each year, with 51 percent of festivalgoers being women. Still, that number is rarely reflected in the lineups, which in another study conducted by Huffington Post in 2016 were typically made up of 66 to 93 percent all-male acts. Outside Lands represents the lower end of that range.
Outside Lands has boasted prime-time sets by female artists or female-fronted acts such as Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Norah Jones and M.I.A., but this year will mark the first time since the festival started in 2008 that a femalefronted act has closed out the main stage as a festival headliner.
Last year, Another Planet Entertainment attempted to court Lady Gaga as its top-tier artist, but she opted to book her own show at AT&T Park against the festival’s closing night.
“When people say we’ve never had a female headliner, Lana Del Rey (who performed in 2016) would be a little bit annoyed by that,” said Another Planet CEO Gregg Perloff. “In my opinion, (because we have three main stages over three days) we have nine headliners, and we try to book the right act for the right stage. There’s more nuance to what we do than just who happens to close a certain stage. I’d say we’ve had more female artists than most other festivals.”