Has the music festival bubble burst? Here's what some fests are doing to survive.

Piet Levy | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Two-and-a-half hours. That's all the time it took for tens of thousands of four-day passes for Lollapalooza to sell out last year.

This year, the Chicago mega-music festival boasts one of its hotter lineups in recent memory: Bruno Mars, the Weeknd, Post Malone, Camilla Cabello.

But when tickets went on sale for the festival, which runs Aug. 2 to 5, you didn't see the usual social-media freak out. Compared to last year, and the past few years, Lolla's tickets just seemed to sit there.

Passes eventually sold out — but it took eight days.

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It's not the only sign that the country's music festival industry — which experienced sudden, massive growth at the tail end of the first decade of the 2000s — is now experiencing a significant slowdown.

That's especially apparent in Wisconsin.

Two festivals — the eight-year-old Country on the River in Prairie du Chien and the seven-year-old EDM and hip-hop bash Summer Set in Somerset — bowed out for 2018. And after 16 years as a five-day festival, Country USA in Oshkosh will scale back to three days for 2019 — a cost-cutting measure intended to improve the bottom line.

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"The days of launching major destination festivals and sinking a few million into the talent budget and expecting people to just show up are over," said Ray Waddell, president of media and conferences for Oak View Group, an arena and stadium management and consultancy firm with headquarters in Los Angeles.

Not that long-established mega-festivals like Coachella in California or Milwaukee's Summerfest are going away any time soon. Festivals are a large portion of a booming live-music industry that has experienced six years of record growth, according to concert trade publication Pollstar.

"By and large, North American music fans remain enamored of the festival experience," Waddell said.

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But beginning at the tail end of the first decade of the 2000s, "festivals were popping up all over the place with the same lineups in other cities, and they were cannibalizing each other," said Bob Babisch, Summerfest's longtime vice president of entertainment. "It was overkill."

For festivals to flourish, good lineups aren't good enough, experts say. So whether it's Bloody Mary deliveries — or even concealed lineups — Wisconsin music festivals are finding ways to set themselves apart in order to survive.

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Competing with the upper tier

In the case of Summer Set — whose past headliners included heavy hitters like Skrillex and Chance the Rapper — organizers didn't learn that lesson soon enough.

"We ended up with the same problem that everybody who produces a festival that's not in the upper tier ends up with," said Scott Leslie, co-president of Madison-based promoter FPC Live. Leslie helped oversee Summer Set's booking as co-president of Majestic Live, which merged with Frank Productions this year.

"We were having to pay for talent as if we were an upper-tier festival and pay for security as if we were an upper-tier festival," Leslie said. "If you're only doing 15,000 people, you can see what the problem was. … If you're not willing to invest just as much, if not more, in the experience for the fans, they are going to go and find a different festival to attend."

That's a key reason Country USA, which began Tuesday and runs through Saturday in Oshkosh, is switching to a three-day format in 2019, said Derek Leibhauser, head of Hyperdrive, the Neenah-based promoter behind the festival and its seven-year-old sister festival Rock USA, returning to Oshkosh July 12 to 14.

"Attendance and revenue did not play into that decision," Leibhauser said, adding that attendance for Country USA has actually increased over the past few years, with about 137,000 attending last year, according to the Appleton Post-Crescent. "We recognize it's so difficult for families to take off that long or find a hotel for that long or find a baby sitter."

Leibhauser said the talent budget won't take a big cut even though two days are getting scrapped.

"We are very confident we are able to put on a higher-quality show in three days instead of five," Leibhauser said. "By saving on production costs or grounds crew costs, we'll be taking extra capital and putting it back into the company, whether to improve the grounds conditions or create different experiences."

Growing a festival by cutting it back

There's a precedent for this move. In 2016, Rock USA scaled back from a four-day event to three days.

"We increased the length of the sets and the number of bands each day," Leibhauser said. "It was so much easier as a planning operation and from a staffing perspective. And the quality of the experience is spurring massive growth."

Rock USA — featuring Godsmack, Rob Zombie and Shinedown among its headliners — will have a 25 percent attendance increase this year, Leibhauser said.

The 32nd annual Country Fest in Cadott — which starts Thursday and also goes through Saturday — is having record attendance in 2018, after scaling back from four days to three this year. Sister festival Rock Fest — in Cadott from July 12 to 14 — had record attendance last year, about an average of 25,000 people a day, when it went from four days to three. Attendance will be on par this year, said Wade Asher, the general manager for both festivals.

Country Fest has Brad Paisley among its headliners and Rock Fest features Incubus and Disturbed for its 25th anniversary, but Asher said "the lineup isn't everything." He credits the festivals' largely permanent facilities for their appeal, including five stages and showers at the campsites.

Secret lineups and Bloody Marys, delivered

And while Rock Fest has competition from the younger Rock USA and the four-year-old Northern Invasion in Somerset (presented by AEG, the world's second-largest live music promoter), it's continued to stand out with tattoo artists, helicopter rides, the "Rock N' Relax" hammock park — even a wedding chapel. New this year: a zombie crawl July 13, on-site wrestling and Bloody Mary deliveries at the campsites.

Eaux Claires in Eau Claire County — co-curated by Bon Iver's Justin Vernon and the National's Aaron Dessner — offers one of the most distinct experiences of any festival in the country, including one-time-only collaborations, literary readings in a mobile hotel room and, introduced last year, a Mom's Booth, where fest-goers could get a squirt of hand sanitizer or chat with the mother of an Eaux Claires artist.

This year, the fourth annual Eaux Claires, scheduled for July 6 and 7, is doing something unusual: It's planning to keep the lineup a secret until guests arrive.

"Those guys' point of view was, 'Maybe we don’t want to just put out another lineup poster and let people pick it apart or form preconceived notions,' " said Brian Appel, co-founder of Crashline, the production company behind Eaux Claires. "There is a lot of booking pressure from a timing perspective. If you have a festival in May, June or July, you want to announce a full lineup in January, February or March, and you need to get all the pieces together a year prior. This gives us the flexibility to add artists the week of the show."

On Twitter, Vernon has teased some of the artists likely to play Eaux Claires, including Sufjan Stevens and the National, with the latter expected to stage a one-of-a-kind event.

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But the secret-lineup approach is certainly risky — particularly when Summerfest hosts acts like Janelle Monae, the Weeknd and Arcade Fire the same weekend.

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Yet Appel said advance ticket sales "are very close to what we've had in the past." About 25,000 people have attended Eaux Claires each year, with about 85% of fest-goers coming from more than 60 miles away, according to Visit Eau Claire.

"There are plenty of places where you can see big headliners now," Appel said. "What we are doing is really talking more about the experience vs. 'Hey, we have these three bands on the bill.' And it's working. The suspense is actually exciting."

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