Beach Road Weekend, the Vineyard Haven music festival and one of the largest events on the Island in recent years, will not continue in 2024 and instead will move to Cape Cod in 2025.
Despite signing a three-year contract with Tisbury in 2022, event producer Adam Epstein said Wednesday that he was halting the summer concert series due to mounting financial pressures and the escalating cost of running an Island event with more than 30 bands.
He pointed to several logistic challenges, such as the cost of transporting the stage and staff to the Island and housing them here for a couple of weeks in August. There were attempts to reconfigure and downsize the three-day festival, but none appeared sustainable.
“At a certain point, we just can’t keep writing that check,” Mr. Epstein said in an interview with the Gazette.
The end of the festival on the Island also marks the end of the MV Concert Series, a separate set of shows that ran outside the festival throughout the summer.
In 2023, Beach Road Weekend incurred seven-figure financial losses for the second year in a row, the organization said in a statement.
The festival has been bringing big names to the Island since 2019, with headliners including John Fogerty, Phil Lesh, Beck, Leon Bridges, Patti Smith and Mumford and Sons.
“Seeing Mumford and Sons headline an event we had built from scratch over the span of five years was exhilarating,” Mr. Epstein said in a statement. “Yet the festival had very clear and unrelenting challenges. For every dollar we saved via experience and efficiencies, our costs would increase by two dollars from other factors. We could never catch up.”
Hotel costs, cargo and ferry-related expenses and the cost of doing a major festival on the Island led to an extra $1.25 million in expenses each year over what the festival would have cost on the mainland, Mr. Epstein said.
Beach Road Weekend co-producer Joe Kosin said the festival will find a new location on the Cape. So far, three locations on the peninsula are all vying for the festival, which Mr. Epstein guaranteed would happen next year.
“It’s not a hope, it’s a reality,” he said.
Thousands of people have attended the Vineyard festival over the years, and PJ Finn, executive director of MVY Radio, said the event was able to attract musical acts that otherwise would not have performed on the Island.
“It was exciting to have that world class level talent on the Vineyard,” he said. “I really don’t think people appreciate how hard it is to pull off something of that scale on the Island.”
The radio station was a sponsor of the event, and Mr. Epstein would help put on a concert for the station’s annual summer fundraiser, Mr. Finn said. MVY does broadcast on Cape Cod, so the relationship could still continue, he added.
Despite its popularity, the festival also created some tension from Islanders. Last summer, Mr. Epstein hinted that the festival could be coming to an end. In an interview with the Gazette just prior to the August shows, he said criticisms over the festival’s amplified sound, traffic and use of Tisbury’s Veteran Memorial Park had him reconsidering its future.
“There’s been a tremendous amount of antipathy toward us,” he said in August. “And, in many cases, it can be demoralizing... So we will make our decision [to continue the festival or not] after this year.”
To try and quell concerns, Mr. Epstein created a team that checked sound levels around Tisbury and Tisbury police maintained a hotline to field festival complaints. After the event, officials said there were no serious issues and about 20 noise complaints.
Last year’s line-up was announced in mid-January and presale tickets went on sale shortly after, prompting recent questions about what was happening with the festival in 2024.
Like the festival, the MV Concert Series also couldn’t stay in the black, especially in the face of post-pandemic rising prices.
“The concert series never recovered after the pandemic,” Mr. Epstein said. “Only a couple [shows] covered expenses. Everything else was underwater.”
Mr. Epstein hoped that Islanders would come to the Cape for the event next year, and said it was likely more tickets would be available at a lower price.
Carolina Cooney, executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber of Commerce, said the loss of a marquee event that could attract national acts to the Island is disappointing, but the Vineyard’s tourism won’t be irreconcilably hurt.
“I think it’s tough not to have exciting events like this on the Island,” she said. “But I don’t anticipate it being a huge hit financially in any way. This is sort of a busy time for the Island regardless.”
She hoped it would present a chance for another business to create a new festival.
“It’s a big loss for us just as music lovers to have something like this happen,” Ms. Cooney said. “Maybe this is an opportunity for someone to step in and put on their own event.”
Mr. Epstein’s company Innovation Arts & Entertainment will still have a presence on the Vineyard. In 2022, the company acquired the Martha’s Vineyard Food and Wine Festival. This year’s Food and Wine event is scheduled for June 6-9.
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