About

Festival information is scattered across a few hundred separate websites, each with its own idea of where the dates go. Deciding between two festivals in the same month means opening two sites, finding two announcements, and holding both in your head.

This site puts them in one calendar, in date order, with the facts you need to choose: when it runs, where, what it costs if that has been published, and whether the dates are settled or still a best guess.

It is built for the whole range of people who do this — someone choosing a first festival, and someone planning a season around six of them.

Festivals in the United States, plus international festivals that draw a US audience. It does not try to be every music event everywhere, and it is not finished — festivals are added continually, and the ones already listed gain detail as their organisers publish it.

Rather than claim a number here that will be wrong next week, the calendar shows what it holds. Where a festival has only dates and a location, the page says so instead of padding the gap.

The thing this site does that a search does not: it separates what has been announced from what has not.

A date the festival has published is marked confirmed. A date carried forward from the pattern of previous years, because next year’s edition has not been announced, is marked approx. — the month is reliable, the exact days are not. Prices work the same way: a published price is shown, and a festival that has not put tickets on sale says that rather than showing last year’s figure.

How we source and check all of this is written out in full.

Some ticket links earn a commission when someone buys through them. It never costs you more, and it never affects which festivals are listed or the order they appear in — listings and dates are decided before any of that is considered. Where those links are live they are labelled.

Nobody can pay to be listed, to be listed higher, or to have a festival left out. There is no advertising on the site, and no analytics or tracking.

The Festivalist is independent. It is not owned by, or operated on behalf of, a festival promoter, a venue group or a ticketing company, which is what makes it possible to say a festival is sold out, badly organised on dates, or not on sale yet.

It is also small. If something here is wrong, a person reads the report and fixes it — there is no queue and no support tier.

Something wrong on a page: report a correction. That is the fastest route, and it is read.

Anything else — a festival that should be listed, a partnership, a question about the data: hello@thefestivalist.com.