Kevin Lyman On Warped Tour’s Return: ‘We Need To Get Young People Back Out To Festivals’ 

Reviving Warped Tour was always in the back of founder Kevin Lyman’s mind. But first he wanted to concentrate on teaching at USC Thornton School of Music and other projects he was working on. So he says it was “really kind of out of left field” when electronic dance music promoter Insomniac reached out with the idea to team up to celebrate Warped’s 30th anniversary.

Similar to the format for the 25th anniversary edition in 2019 that followed the final full-fledged Warped in 2018, Warped Tour will return with three events. The festival is scheduled June 14-15 at Washington, D.C.’s The Fields At RFK Campus; July 26-27 at Long Beach, California’s Shoreline Waterfront and Nov. 15-16 at Orlando, Florida’s Camping World Stadium Campus. Tickets for D.C. (40,000-capacity) and Long Beach (80,000-cap) are sold out. Two-day GA passes (Tier 5) for Orlando are available for $199.99 plus $29.99 fees while VIP passes (Tier 4) are $389.99 plus $59.99 fees. Stay tuned for the lineups, which will be announced in January.

“I’ve always respected that company … how [it’s] grown and done a lot for their community,” Lyman says of Insomniac, which is behind festivals such as Electric Daisy Carnival and Electric Forest. “And enough people over there had worked on Warped Tour in the past so they really understand my philosophy on things. Maureen Valker-Barlow [SVP Partnerships at Insomniac Events] who is kind of point on the project for me knows me really, really well and it’s been really great.”

Pollstar caught up with Lyman to learn more about the 2025 edition and the significance of keeping ticket prices low.

Pollstar: How did you pick the locations for Warped Tour 2025?
Kevin Lyman: We’re using a couple of [Insomniac’s] venues where they’re doing events the week before. One of the big things for me was to be able to figure out trying to keep that ticket price reasonable. Utilizing the infrastructure of existing festivals helps you get there.

There’s going to be three events in D.C. There’s World Pride Music Festival, [Insomniac] has a festival called Glow, and then Warped Tour will come in. And they have EDC Orlando and we’ll be coming in the week after. Long Beach was a little bit of an outlier. … I wasn’t really sure about doing a Southern California play coming back. I was thinking maybe San Francisco … The mayor of Long Beach was super enthusiastic about bringing it back there and it worked out great. I was just worried about some of the radius clauses some of the other festivals have and it really hasn’t affected us.

In the middle of planning Warped, you’re still teaching at USC. How’s that going?
Oh, it’s been wonderful. Especially because I’ve been able to show the students – they’re like a secret society right now. They know things they probably shouldn’t know, but I want them to see the real learning process of what goes into this. … There’s a lot of people who really got this and are really enjoying learning more and they all want to be involved. So, starting to think about how to involve more students in the process of this going forward. The only thing was, one student – I don’t know who it was and I don’t care to know – started putting things on Reddit they probably shouldn’t have, but we live in that society these days, don’t we?

How did you approach putting the lineup together?
It’s a very, very diverse lineup. … We have x amount of dollars to pay artists on this show. We want to be as fair as possible, but when you’re delivering a [low] ticket price like that, you just can’t pay someone and then raise the ticket price on the fans. … We had a budget that we wanted to stick within for booking the talent. And so the bands that are working with us, some of them are taking a potential step back a little bit financially for these shows … to leave enough money to have other great bands on the show. … We’re gonna have 132 bands on the Long Beach shows. I think we’ve got 86 or 84 in D.C. and probably another 130 in Orlando. So the money had to be equitably split up amongst everyone.

How did you land on the ticket price?
They have great budgeting teams over at Insomniac and we were actually at one price that was $20 or $30 higher and once they did all their analysis they came back and said let’s go with this price. I’ve never had a partner come back and tell me, “Let’s go cheaper.” (laughs) It was just like, “OK, we can make this work.”

We need to get young people back out to festivals. … I talk to students and they’re all really, really leery of where the ticket prices have gone. They’re going to less shows. It’s becoming not such a necessity to go to live music for them. And I talk to teenagers who are coming out of the pandemic and there’s a lot of them, that’s when they would have got it in their DNA to go to shows long-term and … they’re not that interested. … Live music [is] not as important as a driver as it was for earlier generations.

I was going to ask your thoughts on the festival market in general as we close out the year and look ahead to 2025 – sounds like making sure the next generation has the opportunity to fall in love with live music is a priority.
Absolutely. … Festivals have gotten to this point where it’s high ticket price, high premiums, high VIP experience, which is fine. That’s their model. [But] 90% of the people out there just want to go have a great day of entertainment. … Though we do have a VIP ticket, we only did a GA and a VIP ticket. We didn’t do GA plus. … Some people do want a better bathroom and a few things like that, but even our VIP program is very reasonable. I think $380 or something for two days. I just really think that we need to pay attention to a segment of the population that just can’t take any more credit card debt. We have to come up with ways to get them hooked on music or it’s not going to be in their long-term DNA to go to concerts.