Why was Woodstock 50 a disaster?
Festival was to celebrate history, but bad management created a flop
Late last year, Michael Lang, one of the producers of the original Woodstock festival in 1969, began to approach music’s most powerful managers and booking agents with a pitch.
Lang wanted to commemorate Woodstock’s 50th anniversary with a three-day, multi-generational event that would draw 150,000 people to a Formula One racetrack in upstate New York. With the Woodstock brand as a magnet, he told them, the festival would celebrate the spirit of the original yet be relevant to the youth of today, according to five agents and other talent representatives who spoke anonymously because the conversations were confidential.
The agents were skeptical. With less than a year before Lang’s chosen weekend, Aug. 16 to 18, time was short. They doubted whether the Woodstock name meant much to generation Z. And how would Woodstock 50 stand out from the glut of festivals already flooding the market?
Still, the agencies agreed to supply top-tier talent to the festival — if Lang and his partners accepted all the risk. As one senior agent recalled their message to him: “We’ll help. But you’re going to overpay us and pay us up front.”
With their help — and with financing from a division of Dentsu, a Japanese advertising conglomerate — Lang and his team booked more than 80 acts, including Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, the Killers, Santana, Imagine Dragons, Chance the Rapper, Halsey and Dead and Company, who were set to perform in Watkins Glen, N.Y. According to court papers, the festival paid $32 million in talent fees.
But in early August, in the most disastrous collapse of a music event since the Fyre Festival two years ago, Lang’s dream came to an end in a humiliating defeat for one of the most storied names in rock history. Lang believes the festival was undone by a bad partner and, as he said in a statement announcing the cancellation, “a series of unforeseen setbacks” — although many of its setbacks seem self-inflicted.
The death of Woodstock 50 is also the story of a former player returning to a changed game. Since the last Woodstock, in 1999 — another disaster, which ended with riots and reports of sexual assault — festivals have become an intensive, competitive and expensive market, with little room for error or miscalculation.
Here’s how Woodstock 50 unravelled.
An announcement, but no tickets
From the beginning, many doubted Lang’s concept. John Scher, a promoter who worked on the Woodstock festivals in 1994 and 1999 and considers Lang a friend, said that when Lang mentioned his idea for Woodstock 50,
he tried to talk him out of it.
“Michael is a dreamer,” Scher said. “He had the most honest of motivations. But as I said to him a year and a half ago, ‘Michael, you have not made a dime from Woodstock three times. Now you’re trying to do it a fourth time?’”
The festival was announced in January, but was far from ready. Organizers had made requests for dozens of artists — their original wish list included Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Drake and Kendrick Lamar — but not confirmed bookings with any of them. Soon red flags began to pop up. Organizers quietly reduced their attendance target to 100,000. The lineup was not announced until March 19 and, strangely, tickets were not set to go on sale until April 22. Then the date for ticket sales came and went, and news emerged that the festival had not secured proper permits — raising serious doubts about its viability.
Within days, Dentsu pulled out and declared Woodstock 50 dead. Lang disputed that Dentsu had the right to cancel under their contract — and a judge ultimately agreed that it did not — but the damage was done. By early June, Woodstock 50 lost its venue in Watkins Glen when it failed to make a $150,000 payment. “Losing Watkins Glen set us back six weeks,” Lang said in an interview. “We never really recovered from that.”