Woodstock 50 Has Lost Its Venue

Update, 10:54am EDT: Loudwire is now reporting that event producer CID Entertainment has now also pulled out. Previous event producer Superfly pulled out in April.

Original post:

With a little more than two months until the planned festival date in mid-August, Woodstock 50 finds itself without a venue. According to TMZ, the Watkins Glen International raceway has terminated its contract with the festival.

The venue’s withdrawal is just the latest blow Woodstock 50 has suffered in recent weeks. Rumors started surfacing in April that the festival was having issues when tickets failed to go on sale on the planned date. Later that month financial backers Dentsu pulled funding and canceled the festival, and while a judge later ruled Dentsu didn’t have the authority to cancel the festival unilaterally they were allowed to keep the $17.8 million in funding they’d taken back. All the while, festival founder Michael Lang kept insisting Woodstock 50 would go on, with the help of Donald Trump’s former lawyer, most recently claiming they were zeroing in on new financing.

That brings us up to the present when, once again, Lang is insisting things are just fine. After the TMZ article was published yesterday, a representative from the festival reached out with this nugget: “We are in discussions with another venue to host Woodstock 50 on August 16th – 18th and look forward to sharing the new location when tickets go on sale in the coming weeks.” Really? The thing is two months away, its financial troubles have been well documented, and even with proper funding and a new venue it’s going to be insanely difficult not only to pull off a festival at this scale but to sell enough tickets to make it work. All the bad press the festival has received won’t help matters any.

I’m skeptical, but we’ll see. Stay tuned! I hope someone is shooting plenty of video footage of all this crap for a future documentary.