Riding The Wave: How Maryland’s Oceans Calling & Country Calling Established Themselves As Premier Festivals (Fest 411)

The festival circuit is chock full of great names and concepts, but few are as aptly titled as Oceans Calling.

When C3 Presents’ Tim Sweetwood scoured the web for a unique festival site over four years ago, there was one that stood out to him, or “called” to him.

“I found Ocean City, Maryland, and the beach. What looked attractive was the size of the beach,”  Sweetwood, a promoter, producer and talent buyer for C3, tells Pollstar. “I already have a festival that I founded and produced in Sea.Here.Now., but that beach is a little skinnier. [Ocean City’s beach] is four times as wide, so I said, ‘Heck, let’s give it a shot.’ … One of the most attractive things about this festival is the site, which is second to none.”

Sweetwood presented the idea to the local mayor and officials were ecstatic about having a music festival near the boardwalk. The original concept for Oceans Calling, which was co-founded by the O.A.R. members Marc Roberge and Jerry DePizzo, was to have it in a ski town.

“I said bluntly, ‘OK. That’s a terrible idea,’” recalls Sweetwood, who is good friends with Roberge and DePizzo. The beachfront was unique in that the infrastructure was already strong with a boardwalk full of businesses as well as an amusement park.

The inaugural Oceans Calling was a millennial’s dream with Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds, The Lumineers, Alanis Morissette, a special set from O.A.R. and many more.

In its fourth year, the festival remains true to its roots while incorporating some younger acts to diversify the audience. The 2026 edition later this month features a stacked lineup, with Twenty One Pilots, Dave Matthews Band, Mumford & Sons, Gwen Stefani, Hootie & The Blowfish and Matchbox Twenty performing Sept. 25-27.

Sweetwood admits that when it comes to booking, he isn’t necessarily looking for a particular genre but more of a “timestamp” of the late ’90s and early 2000s and complementing that with similar but modern pieces.

“Once we had the timestamp, we were able to expand with different genres and realize the band that was catching its wings in 2022 may be similar to a band that caught its wings back in 1995,” says Sweetwater, who built on the success of the event with a sister festival in Country Calling.

Producing large-scale events is costly, especially with rising fuel prices, and Country Calling, which takes place the weekend after Oceans Calling, has helped Sweetwater mitigate financial risk. The country festival benefits from having the stage already set up from the previous weekend, a model followed by other major promoters like Goldenvoice, which hosts Stagecoach in Indio, California, a week after Coachella.

While an established fan base helps some guests commit to both Maryland festivals, Country Calling is an opportunity to expand the brand, branch out into another genre, and draw diverse crowds to Ocean City.

“When you get asked a question or anybody says, ‘Hey, what do you like? What’s your favorite music?’ A lot of people say, ‘Everything,’ and that’s a very common answer,” Sweetwater says. “But what we’ve found when we research this stuff, and funny enough, at the end of the year Spotify lists will tell you, you may say you like everything, but at the end of the day, you are listening to one genre or listening to a handful of bands that are your favorites, whether you realize it or not. So we thought we could go into a country genre, and in this, now that we’ve had it for a few years, we’ve proven it, that there’s actually not much of a crossover crowd between Oceans and Country Calling.

The expansion was also filling a void on the East Coast, which doesn’t have many prominent large-scale music festivals for country music fans.

“Country is a chance for us to say, ‘Hey, there are some really big meccas and really big names in country, and this is a quite big site,'” Sweetwater says. “There are a couple of festivals up the East Coast that do country, but there wasn’t a big marquee one where this site is 55,000 capacity per day. … It’s filling another hole. People forget that the Mid-Atlantic is a very populated area. So when you say you’re doing a festival in Ocean City, Maryland, and it’s country, I’m not trying to just draw from Ocean City and 10 miles down the road. I’m trying to draw from 200 miles.”

By researching the market and fans, Sweetwater is usually ahead of industry trends, including the resurgence of millennial-era acts. Along with the revival of vinyl and CDs is an appreciation for the music of recent decades, and social media has revitalized numerous acts from the ’90s and 2000s, such as the Goo Goo Dolls, who are performing on Night 2 Oceans Calling. Their 1998 hit “Iris” became a viral TikTok trend and has become a streaming success, amassing more than 3.7 billion streams and over 40 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

“Music is more touchable than ever,” Sweetwood says. “What I mean by that is you can find it on TikTok, on Spotify, you can still find it from word of mouth and somebody listening to it at a party. But the one aspect that we forget … is we grew up with the stuff in the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s and now we all have children. … I recently went to a Jack Johnson concert where I found that one of the factual reasons it’s happening is that I could see the two parents next to their child and all of them singing along.

“I think it’s one of the reasons Oceans Calling does well,” he adds. “It appeals to the whole family, not just a single member.”