A 2 a.m. tweet announcing a major change might be expected from our president, but on this occasion, it caught many of the vendors and ticket holders of LouFest by surprise. After rumors swirled about the St. Louis music festival’s money troubles, after many vendors and artists began to demand upfront payments, the festival’s organizers pulled a Michael Scott (that is, they declared that they had no money and that the festival would be canceled).

While this kind of behavior might be acceptable from a CEO circa 2008, we now may or may not live in a world with consequences. What really gets me going is the last-minute nature of this cancellation: everything happened less than a week before the festival was set to take place. To those who were looking closely, it’s clear that LouFest was plagued by these issues for the past few months. A tweet by St. Louis comedian Angela Smith sums up the situation perfectly, drawing a parallel to Joe Edwards’ Loop Trolley disaster: “#LouFest is the Loop Trolley of music festivals.”

Holly Ravazzolo | Student Life

The LouFest balloon floats by the ferris wheel during the 2016 edition of the festival. The
event, scheduled for this coming weekend, was abruptly canceled early Wednesday morning.

But what were all of these problems, and what pushed them over the edge to bring about the end of LouFest? I find the lineup to be the biggest problem: it simply doesn’t merit the $105 price tag of a two-day pass. While in the past I would hear the occasional grumbles about the lineup being bad, this year I couldn’t find a single person excited enough about the lineup to pay the full ticket price. When the artists I’m most excited to see at a music festival in 2018 are Modest Mouse and T-Pain, there’s an issue.

In addition to the lineup, cracks were forming long before the fated tweet was twought. To cover the festival, I applied for a press pass over this past summer; and although I was supposed to hear back from the festival before Aug. 10, I had not received anything from them—not even a rejection—since my application was submitted, nor did I receive any responses to my follow-up emails. My answer finally came Wednesday morning, when a friend sent me an article announcing LouFest’s cancellation. To be honest, I wouldn’t attend the festival without a press pass. Even if I were to have a press pass, I still didn’t want to give up my weekend for LouFest this year.

I had a great time at LouFest last year—and was happy paying for a full price ticket—and am honestly disappointed in the festival’s cancellation, even if I didn’t really want to go this year. It’s unfortunate that the festival is ending after these years of mixed, but overall positive, reviews.

But it’s hard to call past LouFests successes with this announcement of cancellation. The announcement seems to blame everyone but the event organizers. The post lays blame on artists, vendors, sponsors, “unfortunately-timed media coverage”—read: good reporting—and the weather. Although the post mentions the fact that previous events carried their own debt, the event organizers have taken on no responsibility for the disorganization of the event.

And this disorganization and last-minute cancellation is going to have impacts on the city itself. While in the past, LouFest has been an economic boon to the city, this year, that boom has turned into a bust.

At this point, many St. Louis restaurants and food trucks already have a massive amount of extra food prepared with no outlet; and, on top of that, it seems unlikely that these restaurateurs will receive a refund of their vendor fee. Additionally, there is a large amount of merchandise that now cannot be unmade or returned. And these individual businesses, not LouFest, are now on the hook. While larger businesses can absorb this loss, it wouldn’t surprise me to find that some smaller companies took a gamble that now might bring them crashing down.

Now that all of these trash fires have coalesced into one large dumpster fire, LouFest is—for better or worse—a thing of the past. I don’t see how the festival can possibly pull a Big Sean and bounce back after “taking this L.” I have to admit, all snark aside, I’m sad about the festival’s end. It was really nice having a music festival this close to campus and one that, for my time here, was a really fun experience. But now that the event has been canceled and all the problems behind LouFest aired out, it is going to take a lot of effort to put the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube.