12/12/2020
The pandemic’s first major blow to the music industry was the halt of two major U.S. festivals because of coronavirus concerns: Miami’s Ultra’s Music Festival and Austin’s South by Southwest were called off March 6, along with Tomorrowland’s Winter edition in France March 5. The news also started the avalanche of layoffs in the live business, with the March 9 announcement that SXSW had laid off approximately a third of its full-time staff. With only a few hundred confirmed cases of cononarvius in the U.S. at that point, to some people the cancellations seemed overly cautious.
Okeechobee Music and Arts Festival, produced for the first time by Insomniac in partnership with founder Soundslinger after taking 2019 off, went on as planned in Okeechobee, Fla., March 5-8, with the festival releasing a statement assuring the public the festival had “increased our number of hand-washing stations and placed more hand sanitizer dispensers at all bathroom areas.”
The shocks to the live business kept coming in March, with Coachella – long seen as a barometer of the industry – and Stagecoach postponed to October, followed by the
