Re:SET Rethinks the Music Festival

boygenius, by Mikayla Lobasso

LCD Soundsystem, boygenius, and Steve Lacy headline three stand-alone shows in City Park this weekend.

This weekend, Re:SET brings a new kind of festival to City Park. According to the press release, “Re:SET was conceived as an artist and fan friendly alternative to the standard summer concert experience.” Re:SET will take place in 12 cities with three days each booked to vibe with the headliner. Friday will feature headliner LCD Soundsystem with Jamie XX, Idles, Big Freedia, Lost Bayou Ramblers, Tristan Dufrene, and Otto. boygenius will headline Saturday with Claire, Dijon, and Bartees Strange on the bill, and Steve Lacy will top the bill on Sunday with James Blake, Toro Y Moi, and Fousheé opening. Each day will feature one stage so fans don’t have to make hard choices or hustle around.

“With plenty of room to roam, oak trees to relax under, local food and beverage vendors and 4 unique artists on the main stage each day – it’s time to Re:SET your expectations on how live music can truly feel this June at the Festival Grounds at City Park,” the press release says.

The most meaningful difference is that even though weekend ticket packages are available, they have never the focus of the pitch to fans. Re:SET wasn’t booked with the idea of trying to make sure that there was something on the bill to rope in people from all walks of pop music life to spend three days at the festival. That hasn’t typically been the case for summer rock festivals. Voodoo 2019, for instance, cast its net widely enough to catch fans of Guns N’ Roses, Post Malone, Japanese Breakfast, Bassnectar, Brandi Carlile and Beck. Re:SET caters to one musical silo at a time, the bet being that fans who felt underserved by Voodoo, Buku and Jazz Fest lineups will show up for the night that caters specifically to them, and that the vibe will be more communal when everybody is there for more or less the same reason.

Re:SET has taken on unexpected urgency because after years of being a festival Mecca, New Orleans is a little thin on big ticket festivals after Jazz Fest and French Quarter Fest. As we reported, Voodoo is on hold for the foreseeable future, and Buku shut down when it lost its home.

It also comes at a time when people are rethinking the music festival. They are generally expensive, high-risk ways to make a lot of money, and in the last decade they became more common and harder to distinguish from each other. Voodoo-like festivals need arena headliners who could reliably draw 15,000 or so fans since the top lines of any festival sell most of the tickets. That has often translated to booking safe, experienced headliners with established audiences, when we all know as fans that we like to feel cutting edge. At many festivals, that has also meant really booking two festivals—one rock-oriented on a main stage and one dance-oriented on the real main stage, and the poorly kept secret is that the dance stage sells the majority of the tickets.

Buku seemed to be on an interesting track with a more boutique scale that allowed it to book artists who didn’t necessarily sell tickets by the pasture. It could take a flier on who’s hot and deliver an experience that made its fans feel cool. Its last year in 2022 made me wonder how long it would stay that way as Buku expanded its footprint to take up most of the Mardi Gras World property including a stage that bordered Tchoupitoulas. Still, headliners Tyler the Creator and Tame Impala made sense, and Buku focused on fans of Voodoo’s Le Plus stage with lineups based on the musical world that emerged from DJs—hip-hop, EDM, and rock music that shared their aesthetics. Buku tried to serve that relatively coherent audience for two nights, but Re:SET narrows it further. It tries to address one market at a time.

Our tendency is to look at the big, outdoor festival when talking about music festivals, but there are other models. NOLA x NOLA has emerged as a way to focus on the venues that feed the New Orleans music community, and New Jersey is pursuing a similar idea. In June, the North to Shore Festival will take place in different cities around the state to draw attention to its native talent by booking it next to national talent. According to a recent story in The New York Times, the idea is to make a South by Southwest or a Bonnaroo in a state whose values are better aligned with those of its attendees than Texas and Tennessee. Tammy La Force writes:

“Austin and Nashville are great towns,” the governor said, referring to two famous arts hubs that are connected to notable festivals. “But if you stop to consider the cultural priorities of the states that govern them, you say, ‘Wait a minute.’ You’re hoodwinked if you get taken by the coolness.”

Like NOLA x NOLA, North to Shore has some conceptual sprawl to deal with as it tries to embrace comedy, music, film and technology. Neither is an easy elevator pitch, but they represent another vision of festivals that involve creating energy and excitement in the cities’ venues instead of isolated in a field or park, where the sizes of the spaces and the constituencies involved dictate booking decisions.

The success of Jazz Fest’s last two years says that there’s still a market for the giant, sprawling, multi-stage festival, but even it appears to have undergone some tweaks in response to the expenses incurred by putting on a festival and the challenges of attracting traveling audiences in the numbers they once did. Re:SET will take place around the country, so promoters aren’t relying heavily on traveling audiences, but there’s enough real estate between Dallas (technically Grand Prairie) and Atlanta where Re:SET will also stop that the New Orleans dates can draw fans from across the Gulf South.

In the big picture, New Orleans is in a festival lull. Halloween in New Orleans is too good a destination for promoters to let it stay dead. Live Nation will almost certainly eventually stage a festival in that weekend, very possibly with a new name and less historical baggage to carry. If not, someone else will try to move into that space. And when Buku announced its demise, it strongly hinted at its return in some form. “We don’t know exactly what the future will look like,” the press release reads, “but we know that we will gather again someday, in some form, bursting with creativity and purpose.”

Re:SET may be one of those ways since it is promoted in part by Buku producers Winter Circle Productions, but it’s hard to believe that they’re not considering options for ways to get back into the festival game. We’ll see what shape that event takes when and if it happens. In the meantime, Re:SET is an intriguing solution to the festival challenge.