After a real rollercoaster ride, Woodstock 50 was officially declared dead yesterday, when founder Michael Lang shared a statement confirming that the event had been canceled. Lang said in the statement that “a series of unforeseen setbacks” is what caused the festival’s downfall, and now he has gone into more detail about that in a new Rolling Stone interview.
In the piece, Lang places a lot of blame on Dentsu Aegis Network, the festival’s original investor that prematurely announced back in April that the festival was canceled. He said that partnering with the Japanese advertising company “was the biggest factor on why this thing didn’t happen”:
“We just frankly picked the wrong partner in Dentsu. They didn’t really understand the business. When the agreement went at the last minute of just being a backer to a co-producer, they had input into everything that we did.
It just pretty much went off the rails from the beginning. They weren’t cognizant of the timeframe for how these things have to get done and how much work has to get done. So they waited for months before signing [production company] Superfly [who was hired to help produce the festival], which was tasked with getting the permits. Then when they pulled the plug, everything sort of stopped.”
Lang got more specific about Dentsu’s alleged lack of understanding, saying that they waited too long to hire production company Superfly to help them put on the festival, which was a significant issue:
“We signed the deal with Dentsu on, I think, November 2nd. We had started doing a mapping of the site and trying to get all of the elements that were going to have to be described in a mass-gathering permit started. We should have hired Superfly the day after we signed with Dentsu. It took them until the middle of January. That threw everything behind schedule. Superfly was tasked with getting the mass-gathering permit, but they started so late they were frankly unable to finish it up. I think that’s part of the reason why Dentsu pulled out.”
He also addressed comparisons made between Woodstock 50 and the infamous Fyre Festival, saying that they don’t really make sense: “All those allusions to Fyre Festival were so unfounded. That was all about a scam; about selling tickets without having an event. We didn’t put anything on sale until we knew we had the event we were discussing. So I didn’t see any relation to the Fyre Festival.”
Read the full interview here.
