Virgin Fest Acquires KAABOO Festival

Jason Felts – CEO and founder of Virgin Fest, the music festival arm of the Virgin brand – has fully acquired all of the festival brand assets. 

Felts formerly served as a partner and chief brand officer at KAABOO, where Virgin Produced handled many production aspects including artist relations.  The brand, which focuses on an “elevated” experience encompassing music, art, comedy and culinary offerings, will remain in place. The KAABOO brand and signature, multi-sensory experience around live Music, Comedy, Art, and Culinary will remain.

The festival has hosted major talent in its five years, including one of Tom Petty’s final performances as well as a rare festival performance from Pink ahead of her monster Beautiful Trauma tour, and has expanded to multiple markets including KAABOO Cayman (although it won’t return for 2020) and KAABOO Texas at AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, in collaboration with the NFL team’s owner Jerry Jones. The ownership announcement comes as the fifth year Del Mar event sold out around 40,000 tickets per day, and announced it would rebrand as KAABOO San Diego, taking place next year at downtown San Diego’s Petco Park. 

KAABOO San Diego will make use of various areas inside of, and surrounding the perimeter of, Petco Park, including the playing field, Sycuan Stage at the Park, Lexus Premier Lot, and the Tailgate Lot.

“I attended the first KAABOO Del Mar in 2015 with my parents,” shares Jason Felts, “given it was KAABOO’s inaugural year, the attendance was low, however it became very clear to me that the vision was truly unique. It also became clear that KAABOO shared a like-minded approach to Virgin with customer service, while delivering a unique, differentiated, multi-sensory festival product. That, of course, is a testament to the Founders’ initial vision supported by an extremely talented team of professionals who executed upon that vision.”

 

“It was on that basis that we first invested and supported this vision in 2016. We look forward to the future of the KAABOO brand and its festival experiences under our ownership,” Felts adds.

 

“We’re thrilled and delighted to have had this unique vision and grateful having spent the last six years of our lives only to be validated by this acquisition with such an experienced and progressive team,” says KAABOO Co-Founders Bryan Gordon and Seth Wolkov. “We’ve been delighted to entertain hundreds of thousands of live entertainment fans. We are appreciative of Richard and Virgin’s early support of our brand and confident that in Jason and his team’s capable hands, the journey that we started to offer adults a truly differentiated festival experience is sure to live on and grow for many years to come.”

The announcement says KAABOO “will explore new partnerships and continue to reimagine and grow the KAABOO live experience brand with cutting-edge offerings and activations.”

 

The acquisition was brokered and negotiated on behalf of Virgin Fest by a team at Latham & Watkins LLP, led by partner Ken Deutsch. KAABOO was founded by music lover Bryan Gordon and Seth Wolkov, and launched with the flagship KAABOO Del Mar in 2015.

A new Virgin Fest event was announced by Virgin Group Founder Richard Branson in 2018 after receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with details only that it would take place in 2019. Details have not been announced, although sources say it is in the works. Virgin Produced was also on board briefly to help Michael Lang’s embattled Woodstock 50 mega-concert this summer, although the company quickly pulled out saying there “was simply no time” to salvage the event.