February 5th, 2016 – Spring Awakening Music festival announced that it will officially be moving locations for the festival which will be held on June 10th-12th. The official announcement of a new location come as a huge surprise to festival goers who had become familiar with the event being at Soldier Field, conveniently just south of the loop in Chicago. For the 5th anniversary, Spring Awakening’s new home will be in Jackson Park near the Museum of Science and Industry. This move raises a number of questions about the future of the mid west’s largest EDM festival.
DNAinfo Chicago has reported that the festival is being bumped in favor of the Copa América, a South American soccer tournament. This tourney will be held at Soldier Field during the time that has been historically held for Spring Awakening. The tournament will include a number of North American teams, and it’s clear that the Soldier Field power-that-be put considerably more weight behind this tournament than the Mid-West’s largest EDM festival.
The first knee-jerk reaction for this move is to accuse Chicago of being against electronic music or festival culture. That seems to be the current feeling if you do some googling for this particular scenario. However, we aren’t going to make that accusation here at BuildThatBeat because it’s just not true. Not to defend soccer on an electronic music site, but this year is a pretty historic time for the Copa America. It’s the 100 year anniversary of the event, and the first time it’s ever been held outside of South America. That said, the real question here is, ‘Should Spring Awakening go back to Solider Field next year after they’ve been ousted on their 5th anniversary?’
At the end of the day, we need to focus on the positives, mainly this is an opportunity for growth and new beginnings for Spring Awakening.”Jackson Park allows SAMF to continue to grow as the largest dance music festival in the Midwest, with enough space to accommodate our growing number of fans, and will also allow for more stages and bigger production than ever before,” says Jefff Callahan, the founder of SAMF. This may sound like a quality PR statement to justify something out of their control, but there IS a lot of truth to this statement. Eventually they will need larger space, and if Soldier Field is in the cards moving forward, they’ll have to come up with ways to expand.
We’ll keep you posted with any new developments.