Will the Outside Lands Festival really return in August?

Bay Area music fans still might be trying to hold onto the old saying that “no news is good news.”

For that might mean that everything is OK with their beloved Outside Lands, given that organizers remain silent on the fate of this year’s festival.

Yet given everything that’s going on with the coronavirus pandemic, it’s increasingly looking like a real long shot that the show indeed will go on as originally planned.

Judging solely by the festival’s website, sfoutsidelands.com, Outside Lands is still set to go on Aug. 7-9 at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. But things have been on a holding pattern with the festival for months — really ever since the presale “Eager Beaver” tickets went on sale, and quickly sold out, in early March.

That sale happened just before things really starting to escalate with the COVID-19 situation, which quickly affected hundreds of upcoming concerts and large gatherings, including the BottleRock Napa Valley, Coachella and California Roots festivals, all of which were rescheduled for the fall.

March is also usually when Another Planet Entertainment, co-producer of Outside Lands, announces the lineup for the festival. But here we are nearly three months later and the lineup still is under lock and key.

Although Another Planet isn’t commenting on the status of the festival, it would be nothing short of shocking if the event took place as originally planned.

Sure, at first, it seemed like there might be a chance it still could happen in August. Back in mid-March, Outside Lands still felt mighty far away.

That wasn’t the case with Coachella (originally set for April) and BottleRock (originally scheduled for May).

But now those Outside Lands dates are only two months away. And everything has changed.

It’s not just spring and summer festivals that are canceling/postponing/rescheduling, but fall events — like the Monterey Jazz Festival — as well. Meanwhile, many arts organizations are pushing back their fall schedules, some all the way in 2021.

Even those festivals that have been rescheduled for the fall look, at best, iffy now, with a heavy buzz surrounding the need to push Coachella back again, from October 2020 until sometime in 2021. That does not bode well for BottleRock, California Roots, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and other big events scheduled/ rescheduled for the fall. In general, many are not expecting any major festival to take place in California until 2021 at the earliest.

Festivals and other large gatherings won’t return until the final stage of reopening of economy is declared — and there’s been no clear guideline of when that could happen. The timing will depend on so many factors, including the COVID-19 infection rate and whether a vaccine is developed.

Sure, there has been talk about having live music events with reduced — in most cases, severely reduced — capacities to allow for proper social distancing and such. Yet it’s very difficult to see that happening with the major festivals, which rely on drawing huge crowds to be financially successful.

So fans are waiting for official word from promoters, with the understanding that, in this case, no news might not be good news.