Have We Been Doing Music Festivals All Wrong?  

Playback is in Chicago this week for Lollapalooza. Every young person on my plane from New York was dressed cool, and every hotel within walking distance of Grant Park has been sold out. My Uber driver from O’Hare knew why I was in town before I even said anything. I have spent an embarrassing amount of time on the festival app trying to plan my weekend. I have zoomed in on the schedule. I have screenshotted it. I have circled the people I love. 

Lorde, obviously.

Charli, obviously.

My girl Olivia Dean. 

GEESE. I cannot wait. 

But if I’m being honest, Lollapalooza’s lineup this year includes close to 180 acts across four days and eight stages—and that’s before the surprise guests and last-minute additions. Half of these names I’ve never seen before in my life. If I’m being really honest, I probably recognize only about 30% of the poster.

I cannot decide whether I am embarrassed that I do not recognize more names, given that I write about music. I spend an unreasonable amount of my life wearing earphones. Surely I should be able to look at a major festival lineup without feeling as though I don’t know many of the opening acts. 

Today, over hotel breakfast, a friend and I were doing the thing everyone does with a lineup — debating old Lolla years, the way trolls show up every summer to complain the bill isn’t diverse enough, or stacked enough, or that they don’t recognize half the names on it. She had her weekend mapped already: every headliner, plus everyone from her Spotify Wrapped, marked on the festival app. “Why would I spend all this money to go see someone I don’t already like?” Festivals are expensive and nobody wants to gamble an hour on a stranger when someone they already love is playing across the park. 

I think streaming algorithms have turned us into a regular at four restaurants, and we are all standing in a food court full of foreign cuisines unwilling to try something new. Streaming didn’t kill variety. It killed our tolerance for not knowing something yet. There’s a real difference between, “I don’t like this artist” and, “I have literally never had the opportunity to like this artist, because an algorithm decided I was a coastal-indie-girl-with-techno-rock-inclinations three years ago and has been feeding me accordingly.”

SB19 is about to become the first Filipino act in Lollapalooza history. Kingfisher spent 18 weeks in the Irish Top 10 in a town most Americans would have to look up on a map, and now they’re being discovered at a festival instead of the dairy farm in Limerick. 

I’d like to think of a festival  lineup as a museum for a kind of listening we don’t really do anymore — the kind where you’d hear something bleed through the wall at a party, or get handed the aux by someone with worse taste than you and better taste than you expected, or just be structurally forced to stand near a stage you didn’t choose, because your friend wanted a beer and this stage was closer. Grant Park this weekend might be one of the last places engineered for accidental discovery, and most of us arrived having already opted out of accidents.

I am not saying we should treat discovery like a moral exercise. I am not a monk. I want the big songs. I cannot wait to scream every word of “Ribs” with Lorde and the entire crowd. But, where is the fun in spending the weekend listening to your Spotify saved list in the sun? Am I really paying to recreate my own listening habits in a field? Streaming hasn’t made the recommendations worse. The problem is they’re incredibly good—almost too good. Every playlist becomes a slightly different version of yesterday’s version of you. The result isn’t boredom, it’s certainty — and we’ve started mistaking that certainty for taste. Then an expansive festival lineup drops, and instead of asking, “Who might I discover?”, we ask, “How many of these artists do I already know, and how many can I see?” We judge lineups by recognition instead of possibility.

I have a different itinerary to propose—one powered by wandering. By a friend tugging your sleeve. By hearing a roar from a stage across the park and wondering, “What’s happening over there?” You can’t optimize wandering. You can’t schedule the artist you’ll stumble upon five minutes before they become your new obsession. You can’t manufacture the feeling of standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers, as someone you’ve never heard of turns an afternoon slot into the best set of your weekend. Discovery is gloriously inefficient. And there’s beauty in the meander. 

This year’s Lollapalooza’s lineup is really the current music industry turned into a park — pop, house, k-pop, Filipino pop, Irish folk, orchestral music, legacy acts, bedroom indie producers, nepo babies and Finn Wolfhard. It’s a representation where you get to watch the entire music industry visualized live, in real time. 

So this year, I am trying an experiment.

For every artist I already know, I will see someone I have never heard before. Completely blind. No pre-listening on the train. No checking out their biggest song. No inspecting monthly listeners to determine whether liking them will make me ahead of the curve or embarrassingly late. I will walk over, stay for at least three songs and see what happens.

Maybe I will hate it.

Maybe I will discover that experimental rock music before lunch is simply not part of my path. That is fine. The point is not to enjoy everything. The point is to give something unfamiliar a chance before the internet tells me what I am supposed to think about it. I also want to stop feeling embarrassed when I do not know the lyrics. Any festival crowd can feel strangely competitive. Everyone wants to prove that they are the correct kind of fan—not a recent fan, not a fan because of the viral Tiktok song, but someone who knows the early releases and can identify the opening note of every deep cut.

I’m opting out. 

I will ask people which artist is playing.

I will openly Shazam songs.

I will let the person beside me explain why an artist I have never heard of matters to them.

I will dance without knowing what happens next.

I will try not to spend an entire set holding my phone above my head to record a video I will never watch again. 

Maybe being present at a festival does not mean throwing your phone into Lake Michigan and staring earnestly into the middle distance. Maybe it just means heading to Grant Park and not knowing what your favourite act will be.

So, going into Lollapalooza, here are my ins and outs:

Ins 

• Going in blind on an artist you’ve never heard of, on purpose
• Shazaming without shame
• Dressing casually and comfortably
• Dancing at the back—and actually dancing
• Talking to the stranger next to you about who they’re seeing next
• Leaving empty spaces in your schedule on purpose

Outs 

• Pretending you know the lyrics
• Treating the weekend like a to-do list
• Filming performances that you won’t watch 
• Judging someone for not knowing the lyrics

Over the next several days, I will be reporting from across Lollapalooza — the main stages, the early sets, the aftershows, and the spaces in between. I want to understand what this festival says about where live music and fandom are headed in 2026.