The Cincinnati Music Festival is back and better than ever!
The festival, which begins tonight at Paycor Stadium, will feature major names like Nelly, Mary J. Blige, Charlie Wilson, Talib Kweli, Slick Rick, SWV, Hi-Tek and more. But the musical acts aren’t the only interesting part of this year’s fest.
For Bengals fans, stepping into the CareSource East Club might come as a shock. Gone are the concrete, brutalist structures of old; in its place is a welcoming, open-air lounge with giant windows throughout. As part of a $500 million project to renovate Paycor Stadium, the city and the team have transformed the club areas to something more befitting premium status, with 2,000 seats added and plenty of new amenities for club guests.
“Some of the spaces have been renovated, as you can see, and this (festival) is the first opportunity for people to come in and see those spaces,” said Hamilton County Commissioner Denise Driehaus. “We’ve moved stairways around. We’ve made it more inviting, and that’s all part of the work that the county and the Bengals are investing in.”
With the improvements to the structure, the city hopes to show that Paycor Stadium is a top-tier venue for all sorts of events, not just Bengals games. The Cincinnati Music Festival — which Visit Cincy and meetNKY CEO Julie Kirkpatrick called “the biggest tourism weekend in Cincinnati every year” — is the perfect place to show off all the new improvements.
“This festival is, without a doubt, one of the most important things that this city does to bring in new money from the visitor economy every year, for more than 50 years. This event has brought in more than 100,000 visitors and more than $100 million of economic impact. That is small business support,” Kirkpatrick said. “And beside the big numbers, it is about the jobs, about our friends and family working in hotels and restaurants that look forward to this weekend every year.”
For Kirkpatrick, what she’s most excited about is that events are popping up all over town specifically because of the festival, creating a sense of unity in the city thanks to places like Festival513 — a giant, community-led vendor market happening just outside the festival with over 100 booths.
“Businesses are organizing around this festival to take advantage of all of the visitors that are coming in. For example, we’ve expanded our Visit Cincy Marketplace, which has traditionally been on Fountain Square. This year, it is expanding to include the new Elm Street Plaza,” she said. “The festival always continues to grow, and this weekend has grown into having national relevance for this region.”
Driehaus spoke further on making the festival a celebratory experience for everyone in the city, regardless of cost, citing free events like Saturday morning’s Black Music Walk of Fame induction ceremony — which features performances from genre legends Midnight Star and Shirley Murdock — and the popular free R&B concerts at Washington Park in Over-the-Rhine.
“We’re making a real effort to make sure that everybody has access to what’s going on here this weekend. Whether you can afford to pay for a ticket or not, you’ve got access to the celebration,” she said. “I just want to say that as we think about this stadium, which is a county asset, it belongs to the taxpayers. The Bengals play here, yes, but we’ve also talked about bringing in other concerts and high school football games and all of the things that this community deserves and expects. The music festival is the granddaddy of them all … and a good example of what we are doing and what we’re going to do more of as we move into the next year.”
Joe Santangelo, owner and CEO of the Santangelo Group that has led the festival since 1962, said the festival’s low cost and free events are designed to “keep pace with everything else that goes on in the world.” He cited the fact that the festival’s most expensive ticket is $190, and they’ve been running a buy-one-get-one sale on tickets for just $50 in the last few months.
“Many concerts are four, five, six hundred dollars … we have to make it really worthwhile for people to come in and say this is a great way that I can spend my entertainment dollars, and I can get my biggest bang for the buck,” Santangelo said. “It’s up to us to keep the festival really relevant and at the forefront of people’s minds, so they’ll want to return every year.”
Santangelo said he is glad that the festival’s returning to Paycor Stadium with a brand new layout. In years past, parts of the CMF were held at the Andrew J. Brady Center, and performers inside Paycor were separated across two different stages on opposite ends. This could make seating in past years difficult, as front-row seats for one performer could prevent guests from properly viewing the other.
“Last year we had two stages side by side, and the acts had all just gotten so big that they need more room, and so we went to this one large stage. The sight lines are much better because you’re not looking at such an angle into the stage the way you used to. It’ll be a much better experience for the people. It’ll be a better experience for the artists, and it’ll be an all-around better experience for everybody,” Santangelo said.
For more information on the Cincinnati Music Festival, visit the official website.
