Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival organizers Goldenvoice are birthing yet another music festival, this time on the opposite coast. The Panorama Music Festival will take place in New York’s Randall’s Island Park from July 22-24.
While a festival lineup hasn’t been announced thus far, it will likely include a similar array of popular musicians from around the world as the company’s well-established California effort. Specific details will follow in the next few weeks.
“We look forward to bringing Panorama to New York City and introducing a new festival that showcases today’s top music acts,” said festival producer Mark Shulman in a release. “We’re committed to creating an event that will provide significant benefits to New York City with the level of experience and meticulous attention to detail for which Goldenvoice is known.”
Like virtually all music outings of its kind, the new festival is not without controversy, though. Critics claim that the large production company is aiming its guns squarely at the midship of the popular homegrown New York music fest, the Governors Ball, whose 2016 music festival will take place in the exact same location just seven weeks prior.
While both festivals will coexist in 2016, it is likely that the better-funded effort from the Coachella crew will overshadow the older festival in the end, as both fans and big name artists will likely pick the more-hyped of the two when given the choice. In fact, when rumors of the new festival first appeared last year, the team behind Governors Ball went so far as to petition the city of New York to disallow the festival’s original planned location in Queens. The Governors Ball organizers didn’t want the new festival located anywhere in the area.
And while the Governors Ball festival may have won that battle — with Panorama getting pushed out of Queens this year — it lost the war for its monopoly on the region, as the Coachella festival organizers secured the exact same location as the Governors Ball for the first Panorama Fest.
But this year, at least, harsh business between promoters means good news for music fans on the East Coast. The two competing festivals will likely both have stacked lineups — the first battle of the turf war to come.
