There will be no stages splayed across Flagler Drive next weekend on West Palm Beach’s downtown waterfront. No floating booze barges, no throngs of fans bellying up to the bellowing amplifiers.
The downtown streets will be comparatively still — open to traffic and absent the massive cast-of-thousands revelry that once was as certain as humidity on the first weekend of May.
SunFest, Palm Beach County’s largest live music event, has come to an end, for now, after 40 festivals in a 42-year span. Interrupted only by the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival drew millions of people to the city’s waterfront over the years, bringing some of music’s biggest names to generations of fans gathered along the Intracoastal Waterway.
But like so many things that emerged in an analog era, SunFest struggled to evolve as the live music business was rocked by a boom and bust, a shifting business model and the disruption of a pandemic.
South Florida’s oldest music festival grew over the decades in stature and ambition, evolving from a sleepy jazz-and-art festival into a three-stage, five-day event that drew A-list performers, hundreds of thousands of revelers and millions of dollars a year in revenue.
By the time organizers pulled the plug last year, attendance had dropped by nearly two-thirds and the scaled-back festival had lost millions of dollars.
After years of cutbacks, price hikes and experimentation, organizers realized SunFest was no longer sustainable.
Simply put, “the numbers didn’t come out to what we needed them to come out to,” said Dan Goode, SunFest’s executive director.
SunFest is hardly alone. Large and medium festivals all over the country are facing new financial difficulties.
Citing declining attendance, the 48-year-old Beale Street Music Festival in Memphis canceled its 2024 and 2025 shows. The 9-year-old Okeechobee Music and Arts Festival in Okeechobee County did likewise.
Even mega-festivals are seeing declines. Last year ticket sales slowed for the once red-hot Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California, the nation’s largest live music event. The Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert failed to sell out last year for the first time in a decade.
Industry experts blame a host of factors, from a glut of festivals that formed in the 2010s, driving up the costs of hiring musical acts, to new market dynamics that make stadium tours more lucrative for top acts, to inflation and changing tastes among younger, digital-music-streaming adults.
“The world just looks different,” said Paul Jamieson, SunFest’s executive director for 17 years before retiring in 2023. “There was this massive increase in competition, and that increased the price of the main product.”
The event’s creators hardly could have imagined what SunFest would become when they organized the first one in 1983. The first festival was a free, 10-day series of events that featured school choruses, Jazzercise and a tightrope-walking family.
By the next year it was a shorter fixture on the downtown waterfront, a no-frills jazz-and-art festival.
The 1980s version of SunFest featured live music, fireworks and juried art shows. Single-day tickets ranged from $2 to $5, while acts like Kenny G and Bonnie Rait and other, more low-profile acts played to crowds.
SunFest was formed as a non-profit organization, but its purpose was unabashedly capitalist: to draw business to the area’s hotels and restaurants in the so-called “shoulder season” between tourist-heavy winter and the blistering summer.
Eight years in, festival organizers leaned more heavily into their music orientation. Sue Twyford, the festival’s director, raised ticket prices and sought to book more well-known musical headliners.
“I thought Sue had lost her mind when she said she wanted to double the ticket prices,” recalled Jamieson, “but she was 100% right.”
“In 1990, our headliners were no one you would ever remember,” he said. “In 1991, ticket prices were double, and the headliners were Crosby, Stills and Nash and Harry Connick Jr.”
The festival set attendance records, with organizers estimating more than 300,000 visitors over four days. The modern SunFest was born. The festival would go on to draw a host of iconic musicians. Its stages were graced by mid-20th century legends like Bob Dylan, James Brown, the Beach Boys and the Four Tops.
Eighties icons Cyndi Lauper and Billy Idol performed, as did popular rock groups like Weezer, Hootie & and the Blowfish and the Killers. As the festival expanded its musical range, hip-hop stars such as Pitbull, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar took the stage, too.
Even as ticket prices rose, it remained more affordable than many similar festivals. As a non-profit, SunFest was supported in part by grants and was powered by more than 2,000 volunteers who helped with setup and logistics.
Gregg Weiss, now a county commissioner, began volunteering in 2006 and watched the organization adapt to new logistical challenges as it grew in stature.
“It was its own community onto itself,” he said. “It was like building a city in a week. It had water, electricity. It was a lot of fun to be a part of it.”
The festival made sure over the years to provide a range of attractions beyond music. There were fireworks, powerboat races, U.S. Navy ship tours. In 1998, Nickelodeon’s Game Lab hosted two shows, where a 9-year-old who answered trivia questions correctly was „slimed“ in front of hundreds of screaming spectators.
Celebrity chef Rachael Ray demonstrated how to prepare a jerk turkey burger in 2004. A “Meet the Minions” event thrilled children in 2015.
The number of floating barges expanded to three in 2005. In 2011, a 5K run was added, along with a dueling piano bar on the south barge.
Jamieson recalled that it was in the late 2000s that he and the other leaders of SunFest decided to go big on music. More of the festival’s budget would be focused on bringing buzzworthy acts, and ticket prices would rise accordingly.
“We came to realize that no matter how we looked at the festival, the public really looked at it as a music festival,” he said.
“We were saying if that’s the case, perhaps we should also look at the festival that way,” he continued. “That became the beginning of when we started to put more of an emphasis on the music, and more dollars on the music.”
Indeed, prices began a long, rapid increase. Between 2005 and 2015 the price of a single-day ticket bought at the gate doubled, from $20 to $40. Eight years later, it would rise to $100.
The changes drew criticism. In 2007, one of the festival’s creators, Bill Finley, complained that the size and harder edge of its musical lineup was keeping families away.
“Dragging kids through those big crowds is not a great thing,“ he said.
But organizers were intent on making sure the event appealed to younger generations of festivalgoers. “We wanted SunFest to not be your parents’ festival,” Jamieson said. “We wanted to be more current.”
Diversifying musical styles brought in younger crowds, but it also drew concerns. In 2012, West Palm Beach Mayor Jeri Muoio objected when the festival’s planners recruited popular rap artists Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa.
„I’m not a prude about this stuff, but really what are we saying about this city when Thursday night is Wiz Khalifa and Snoop Dogg?“ Muoio said at the time. „I don’t like the crowds they brought, the behavior of the crowd they brought, and the number of drugs that were around.“
The following year an 18-year-old high school student was stabbed during a Mac Miller show at SunFest, though he recovered.
ER Bradley’s Saloon, the landmark waterfront restaurant, has shared space with the festival for decades, profiting from the massive crowds but also stymied by its road closures.
Over the years, its managers began to see the festival as less of an asset and more of a nuisance.
“It’s changed over the years. It’s not what it used to be, honestly,” said Edwin Bermudez, Bradley’s general manager. “You’re not getting as many families down here. You have more younger groups running around. There’s drugs in the air, you can smell it. It’s definitely changed.”
But SunFest was in an escalating competition.
“I remember around 2014-15, somewhere in those years, we kind of upped our game with entertainment, kind of took it to a different level,” Goode said. “Looking back, we maybe got too big too quickly during that time. But it was also during a festival boom.”
The 2010s saw a spike in festivals across the country. Mega-festivals such as Burning Man, Coachella and the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival were becoming household names, and smaller festivals were springing up to ride the wave.
The Tortuga Music Festival formed in Fort Lauderdale in 2013. Okeechobee Music and Arts Festival started up in 2016. The Sunset Music Festival launched in Tampa in 2012.
“Festivals became basically a pop culture phenomenon,” Jamieson said. “In 2010 SunFest was maybe the only game in town, and suddenly there were many other festivals.”
The increased demand for acts drove up the costs of booking major performers. Without those big-name acts, organizers feared the crowds would no longer come. The only solution, they reasoned, was to keep chasing popular names — and keep raising prices.
“You could kind of see that if you had better talent, you could get more people,” Jamieson said. “If you had more people, you could generate more dollars, and you could hire more talent.
“It was a step into what later became a vicious cycle,” he continued, “but at the time we were really responding to what they said they wanted.”
The steady stream of big names generated excitement, with the annual reveal of the concern lineup becoming a big social media event. But the rising prices alienated longtime loyalists.
For decades, Chris DeStafano blocked out the beginning of May in his social calendar. Every year he would buy tickets for the entire festival, and splurge for passes to the VIP areas. He loved the music and perusing the art, but mostly he enjoyed the environment.
“There’s a lot of options out there,” he said, “and for 20 years the only option I wanted in early May was the Clematis waterfront.”
He recalled fondly the small-town sensation of walking along the waterfront each year and mingling with friends he’d encounter. Even when it rained, he said, being outdoors, drinking cocktails and listening to music on the waterfront was sublime.
“You just walk along the water and you always run into somebody you know,” he said. “That’s what I remember, the breeze along the water.”
By the early 2010s, though, the sticker shock of buying VIP packages was taking a toll. He also was getting older, while the target audience for the festival was veering younger.
“Right around 2010-2011, if we’re here three, four nights, I’m dropping close to a grand,” he said. “For that grand, I’d much rather be in The Keys submerged somewhere.”
The now-retired journalist would attend SunFest occasionally until 2023, but he would study the musical acts first, and pick his days carefully.
Ticket prices kept rising, and big acts kept coming. In 2018, the festival was reduced from five days to four. Single-day tickets at the gate rose to $54, a 35% increase from just three years earlier.
The 2018 event featured a lineup packed with popular acts from a variety of genres — Ice Cube, Pitbull, 311, Cake, Third Eye Blind, Nick Jonas. The festival was spending more and more on its artists. That year, it said it shelled out more than twice as much on music as it did in 2010, about $4.2 million.
But behind the thrumming crowds and memorable performances, problems were brewing. Despite the price hikes, the festival reported $1 million in losses on its tax filings. The next year SunFest hiked ticket prices again, to $60 for a single-day ticket at the gate. Yet its losses nearly doubled, to $1.9 million.
With the festival in financial free fall, SunFest quietly sold its Clematis Street office in July 2019, banking $4 million from the sale.
Festival leaders knew they had a problem. And Jamieson said they were looking at ways to pivot to a different sort of event. The building sale had given them some money to hold them over while they experimented.
“We were going to try some different things in 2020 that we were fully aware might take two to three years to have the effect we wanted them to have,” he said.
“And then,” he said, “they were interrupted by COVID.”
The coronavirus pandemic shut SunFest down in 2020 and 2021 — the only times the festival did not take place in its 42-year history. The organization responded by cutting its staff in half.
In July 2021 it won a $3.5 million federal stimulus grant for shuttered venue operators, another crucial salve for a foundering operation.
When the festival returned in 2022, it continued hiking prices. In 2023, SunFest shrank to three days. The cost of a single-day ticket skyrocketed to $100, more than double the cost six years earlier.
Organizers splurged on big acts, bringing Flo Rida, The Killers and the Chainsmokers. But attendance kept falling. Organizers reported just 75,000 people attended in 2023, less than half the turnout in 2017. A few months later, Jamieson announced his retirement.
SunFest cut ticket prices slightly in 2024, but attendance kept plummeting, to 66,000. Six months later, organizers announced the festival would not take place this May.
“We are not saying SunFest is going away,” a statement on the festival’s website said. “Just taking some time to create something new and fresh.”
Goode confirmed, though, that there would be no festival of any sort in 2025.
Could SunFest ever have been saved? Even with the benefit of hindsight, organizers say it’s hard to say.
Other for-profit festivals continue operating in Florida while charging far more than SunFest ever did. But it’s not clear whether SunFest’s audience would ever have allowed a festival once known for its accessibility to make the same pivot.
“Even looking back on it now, it’s still not an easy answer,” Goode said.
The festival’s leader is clear on one point though. If SunFest does reemerge, it will look very different.
“I don’t think SunFest will come back as it was,” he said. “Something’s got to change.”
Palm Beach Post staff writers James Coleman and Chris Persaud contributed to this story.
Andrew Marra is a reporter at The Palm Beach Post. Reach him at amarra@pbpost.com.
‘A vicious cycle’: SunFest’s big music bet thrilled millions, then drove it out of business – The Palm Beach Post
