Across the country, other concert promoters, including industry-dominating giants Live Nation and AEG, were scrambling as well. The Summerfest team was faced with a $186 million question. “We could’ve sat on those dates and hoped for the best, but hope wasn’t really a plan for us,” he says. Seeing SXSW go down, Smiley knew things would only worsen. The cancellation of SXSW, which brings in some $356 million for the city each year, was the first huge shockwave, triggering new urgency in conversations about other music events. On March 5th, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez shut down the Ultra Music Festival out of “an abundance of caution,” while emphasizing that it shouldn’t be a “cause for alarm.” The next day, the city of Austin shuttered South by Southwest, one of the largest annual conferences in the world. Then came a rash of new reported cases and revelations that the virus had already been spreading through American communities, undetected by nearly nonexistent testing, for weeks. had been canceled, and nearly 100 cases of the virus had been confirmed in the U.S., including in California.

In the first week of March, the novel coronavirus was not yet a pandemic halting the entire world in its tracks, but concerts across Europe and Asia had all but ceased, a number of upcoming festivals outside the U.S. Our entire company wasn’t sleeping well because of the uncertainty.” Everyone’s phone was blowing up every five seconds with breaking news, breaking news, breaking news. “I had my eye on it early, trying to convince friends of mine to keep their eye on it. “The vibe was walking on eggshells,” Smiley says.

In its 52-year history, Summerfest - which was set to include performances by artists from Justin Bieber to Guns N’ Roses this year - had never been canceled or postponed. With the news darkening, he began to seriously consider dismantling the event’s entire meticulous plan. As the chief executive of Milwaukee’s Summerfest - which calls itself “the world’s largest music festival,” attracting 900,000 people over 11 days each year - Smiley was confronting a tidal wave of reports about the outbreak of COVID-19 in the U.S. It was the beginning of March when Don Smiley started planning for the worst.

Fill the gap concerts