Twin Cities Summer Jam may prove, yet again, that we don't like music festivals

You know I have to be intrigued if I dust off my retired blog to write about something happening in the Twin Cities this weekend at our giant horse track, Canterbury Park.

While this blog has been reserved for commentary on the broadcasting geniuses of the Twin Cities market, I'm going to deviate, sort of. More on that another day, I think.

For the record, I have nothing to gain by the success, or failure, of Twin Cities Summer Jam, the latest effort to create a music festival in a major metro area that can't seem to support one.

We've had varied success over the years with festivals. Ozzfest seems to have drawn well in the past when it toured here, but it was a one-day tour. Specialty festivals of one or two days do fine. I don't know how to describe Cities 97 when it comes to its playlist, but their niche seems to draw well for two nights every July at the Basilica Block Party. Some hip hop gig does OK as a one-day festival at our treasured state fairgrounds early each summer. I don't know how successful, but nobody gets shot at it, as best I know, so I'd call that a success.

In the past Canterbury Downs/Park has hosted a variety of concerts. We're reminded occasionally that Lilith Fair came through two centuries ago and dazzled the masses. And our local Clear Channel stations (I'm old school, I still shop at Dayton's) use to do one-day radio station events at Canterbury in the fall for a few years, after the horses went to the glue factory at the end of the racing season. Canterbury has hosted a variety of other musical conclaves over the years, as best I recall, so there's some track record of success, it seems. Lord knows they have plenty of room for it all.

But shutting down their horse racing for a weekend in order to host a summer festival spanning three nights, and multiple genres, seemed like a bold move, at minimum.

This market seems to struggle with multi-day music festivals, and I'm not sure why. Years ago the geniuses behind Live Nation, the concert production company, tried to turn Harriet Island in St. Paul into the scene of a music festival. That lasted one year. Prior to that the geniuses running the Taste of Minnesota essentially killed the event by trying to turn a lame food festival into a nightly music destination. I might have the details of those two items slightly incorrect, but I'm old, my memory isn't the best. And I'm lazy. I don't feel like Googling old Pioneer Press stories.

The Twin Cities just doesn't have the desire for a major music festival. I don't know why, but look at what a major production Milwaukee's Summerfest is each year around the Fourth of July. It features about 10 days built around music, from noon until close. We're better than that here in Minnesota, evidently.

So trying to craft any sort of music festival is a bold move, if not outright foolish.

But let's say it's a safe bet. Did it make sense to host it this weekend?

This very same weekend was also host to a well-established festival in northern Minnesota, Moondance Jam. And there's a major rock festival going on this same weekend a couple of hours east in Wisconsin, Rockfest.

I wouldn't argue that those events are killing Summer Jam, or are competing for Summer Jam's audience. The rock festival in Wisconsin is high-octane hard rock. Summer Jam has relatively safe, geriatric rock, such as Aerosmith and REO Speedwagon. Sure, they booked local alt-rock darlings Soul Asylum and a harder rocking band of a 20-year vintage....yes, 20 years... Buckcherry, but the Summer Jam lineup won't be confused with Wisconsin's Rockfest.

Moondance Jam seems more akin to the market Summer Jam is aiming for. But Moondance is a little more streamlined. There's no major country headliner at Moondance Jam, and nothing that resembles Pitbull, as best I can tell. And Moondance seems to be an event that is based upon camping and making a long weekend out of it. Loud nights, lots of drinking, little sleep. I don't get the appeal, but plenty do, and Moondance is a huge annual success.

So is Summer Jam's weekend of choice brilliant, or brutal? Summer Jam thinks that fans of Buckcherry are fans of Aerosmith, Pitbull, Rascal Flatts, Tim McGraw and REO Speedwagon. Some people probably are. But it seems like a gamble to try to convince people that they want to spend more than one night at your festival when you get Aerosmith, Pitbull and Rascal Flatts during that three-day extravaganza.

And I get it, you can't simply book any band for any weekend  you want. You have to pick a weekend and book whomever is touring in your area and is willing to come to Minnesota if your price is right.

Wisconsin's Rockfest is happening the same weekend as another hard rock fest in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson and others are playing both fests this weekend. Makes total sense. I have no idea how similar or different the fests are, but they're far enough apart that they can co-exist, evidently, and can take advantage of each other when it comes to getting bookings for this weekend.

Did Summer Jam benefit from any sort of synergy with other festivals happening 3-5 hours away? No. Inexplicably, the one hard rock band on the Summer Jam bill, Buckcherry, is not at either Wisconsin rock festival this weekend.

As for Moondance Jam, how many of its performers is Summer Jam booking? None.

Again, Summer Jam isn't necessarily competing for the same audience, but having major festivals elsewhere this weekend doesn't help. If you think your Pitbull fans love Rascall Flatts, then you have to assume some of your Aerosmith fans are going to choose Rob Zombie at Rockfest or Lynyrd Skynyrd at Moondance.

So Summer Jam chose a weekend when there's major competition, and isn't benefiting from the bands that are coming to the midwest for those festivals. Perhaps this is the only weekend Canterbury was willing to shut down for this festival. (UPDATE: It turns out Tim McGraw was at a festival south of Milwaukee on Friday night, so Summer Jam did find a little synergy to exploit.)

It seems that the brain trust behind Summer Jam would have wanted to pick another weekend. Could they have? I won't know, but the weekend they've chose doesn't seem to be advantageous. At all.

Ultimately Summer Jam isn't likely to be a victim of competition, but having other festivals the same weekend can't possibly be helping draw people to Canterbury Park. I'll give Summer Jam a pass when it comes to choosing a poor weekend, but the organizers didn't take advantage of the regional activity taking place. At all.

So as curious as Summer Jam is, the execution of it has been flawed, to say the least. I'll apologize now, I'm enjoying the angst and vitriol. That sounds wrong, of course, but at least I'll admit it. We accept that NASCAR fans love the unavoidable crashes, so long as nobody is killed, and NHL diehards insist that fighting is a part of the game that shouldn't be eliminated. I'm no worse than those people for enjoying the rants of the Summer Jam disgruntled.

It's well documented on Twitter and Facebook, and you can find a few news articles starting to air Summer Jam's dirty panties. They set the price points too high and/or expected far too many to pay the premium prices for the best seats. As a result they cut prices on tickets days before the festival, claiming new sponsorship money made it possible.

Really? The only reason they lowered prices is because a sponsor kicked in money to have their name associated with the festival in its final days? If it smells like bullshit....

So those who wanted great seats for the festival were penalized for buying early. I have no sympathy for you.

Had you bought those tickets and it turned out that the venue sold out, and the secondary market was selling the tickets at 150% of face value, you'd feel like a genius, and happily sell them for a profit when your Aunt Marilyn died days before the show and you had to skip the festival in order to travel to Michigan for her funeral.

Best analogy I read about the pricing: It's like airline tickets. You book two months in advance, and the price could drop the next day, or rise the next day, and it could go up or down many times in the weeks prior to departure.

I think that's a good comparison.

The difference, of course, is that airline passengers don't usually talk to each other about what they paid, and when, for their tickets...all you can know is how much less, or more, you might have paid had you booked earlier, or waited longer, if you want to track those sorts of things. With Summer Jam, you can't know what the guy in the beer line paid for his ticket, unless you ask, but you know they were trying to get asses through the gates in the final days, at a discount, and that could have been you had you not been so eager to spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of tickets to see Aerosmith on a disgustingly humid night in Minnesota.

Moral of the story: You deemed the tickets were worth the price you agreed to weeks ago, and then they had a sale days before the show. You can't count on that, so you make a value judgment at the price you agreed to pay, and that's the way it goes. If the market value goes up or down, it doesn't matter, as you have already made your choice. End of story.

Except it's not the end of the story, of course. Even with price breaks in the final days, there weren't nearly enough premium ticket buyers to justify the premium seating allocation at the festival, by many accounts. So for the past two nights the people who paid for those premium seats, at whatever price days or weeks ago, found themselves rubbing elbows with tons of people who decided a general admission ticket at the back of the grounds was all they could justify.

This is where I have a lot of sympathy for those who paid for VIP access, at any price. I've read plenty of comments on  Summer Jam's Facebook page about people finding themselves suddenly surrounded by the unwashed masses because the organizers didn't want a pathetic looking festival with tons of empty space in front of a mob of general admission rubes, and therefore opened the VIP floodgates to fill that open space ahead of the rubes.

That's downright shitty. And people have expressed that on Facebook, wondering where there refund is for paying premium dollars and then being disrespected.

They have to be smart enough to know that Summer Jam won't be refunding them any money. You paid your cash, you got screwed and they won't care enough to make it right. Based upon how desperate they were to move tickets in the final days prior to the festival, they'll be lucky if they have enough money to cover all the expenses, even with sponsors.

I have no idea if the festival will be deemed a success of failure financially, only time will tell, and it still won't tell us the whole story. But given what a debacle this has been on multiple levels, I would bet against another Summer Jam next year.

Yeah, I get it, you need to learn from experience and make improvements. But let's be realistic. They didn't invent the wheel. They shouldn't have had to learn so many hard lessons in 2019.

They couldn't figure out how to set up video screens that worked properly during at least some of the performances, or how to configure their grounds so that a huge area of general admission access didn't have an obstructed view of the stage. They couldn't figure out how to price and allocate their sections so that they'd draw a crowd and sell enough tickets without having a fire sale in the final week. They picked a weekend when they gained almost nothing by having other regional festivals going on. What makes anyone think that they'll make any money when this is all over?

If I was to bet $5, I'd bet there's no Summer Jam next year. Yes, it could be improved 1000% and draw a nice crowd, and this weekend hasn't been a total failure, but with all its shortcomings, it's hard to believe that this will become a new tradition in midwest music festivals.