Today is a sad day for many music fans like myself. Today was the day where the news spread that 2018 is going to be the last year for Vans Warped Tour. Seeing this news on Twitter broke my heart as the traveling music festival has been a great tradition and an amazing experience for fans of so many music genres. For those of you who are not familiar with the Warped Tour, it was originally created back in 1995 by Kevin Lyman and featured several different genres of music specifically rock, punk rock, heavy metal, and hip hop. In fact, for many bands performing on the tour was their kickstart into the main stream culture of music, bands such as No Doubt, Blink-182, Linkin Park, The Black Eyed Peas, Katy Perry, and many more have performed for the festival. The Vans Warped Tour goes across the country to many different cities from May all the way to November and has done this every single year since its founding making it the music industry’s last remaining major traveling festival.

Producer of the festival, Kevin Lyman, claims the reasoning behind the tour’s cancelling after next year is due to several factors; such as a declining number of bands or acts that are willing to play through the entire tour, declining ticket sells among teenage demographics, and simply Lyman as well as many other people behind the scenes that make every show possible just don’t want to do it anymore. Think for a second, these people have to go and travel for about seven straight months and they have been doing so for close to 25 years now. In an interview with a journalist from the Billboard Lyman says, “Before Warped I was on three years of Lollapalooza, so 26 straight summers out on the road... but traveling around the country with a tour this size in the landscape that we’re in is… to be honest, I’m just tired.” When the enjoyment is taken out of it, there truly is no reason to continue on with the tour unfortunately for fans like myself. On the bright side, we all have one more chance next year to see this festival for the last time and I don’t know about you but I’m not going to miss it and I’m sure you won’t want to either. Lyman and his crew are going to make it a legendary and memorable experience so let’s get out there and enjoy it!

Citation

Payne , Chris. “Music Charts, News, Photos & Video.” Billboard, Billboard , 15 Nov. 2017, www.billboard.com/.