2022 Album Fictional Festival Series Introduction

Last year, I did a series that I called the Fictional Festival series where I made festival lineups for fictional festivals of different genres that I created using only artists who released albums in 2021.  I planned on releasing a series last year that included artists who released albums in 2022, but I got busy; as such, I'm finally just releasing these now.  The logic behind this is that often artists will tour to support an album, so I considered artists who released studio albums, compilation albums, EPs, live albums, select re-release albums, and more.  I didn’t consider artists who released singles but no albums because it is not as common for an artist to tour to support the release of a single.

Like last year, I completed several festivals of different genres.  I will release them in order of completion, with the first to be released being a Warped Tour inspired festival and the last being a general festival.

As a generic setup for most festivals, I copied the setup that Epicenter Festival had in 2019 because it’s easy enough to manage/modify and I like the setup.  It is set up as a 3-day festival for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with 68 total acts (22 Friday, 23 Saturday, and 23 Sunday).  There are 4 stages that I will refer to as Main Stage 1 (or Main 1 or M1), Main Stage 2 (or Main 2 or M2), Side Stage 1 (or Side 1 or S1), and Side Stage 2 (or Side 2 or S2).  There will be at most one artist performing at a time between the two main stages and at most one artist performing at a time on the two side stages.  The main headliner for the day will be scheduled to perform a 2-hour set while all other acts have 30–60-minute sets.  The all-genre festival will likely have a different setup, as I have not finished this one at the time of posting.  While most festivals will follow this setup, there are some that have a modified setup for various reasons related to the genre and type of festival.

A few other notes related to the series:

·         All artists are in order as how they would be in order as of the end of 2022.  If an artist had a major break through in 2023 or later, this was not considered.

·         The order of artists in the lineup listing and timing of performances are largely arbitrary; while most would care a lot about this, I really am not as bothered by this for this series.  In an actual festival announcement, multiple individuals would be collaborating with this so it would be a better representation of how they should be ordered.

·         Once I post the lineups in the blog posts, I am not making any adjustments.  While I am making adjustments prior to release if any artists break up, cancel their tour, retire, pass away, or cause reasonable controversy to justify pulling them off the lineup, I won’t make any adjustments after I post them (which is different than how it would normally be treated).

·         I do not have a particular location in mind for each festival so I will not assume that there are any regional reasons to have one act listed higher than another.

·         While there are times listed for the acts, those would be flexible, especially for the headliners.  For instance, the headliner on each day has 2 hours scheduled, but certain artists might go on for longer (such as those for the jam festival) or shorter (such as those for the extreme metal festival).

·         There is not a set date for the festivals, and I did not compare each artist’s schedule.

·         One thing I did in past Fictional Festival posts was explain my reasoning for several artists.  I won’t do that in this specific series.

·         Ultimately, the reason I did this is because I find this to be fun and there seemed to be overall positive feedback from the previous fictional festival lineups.  That said, one thing I think would be fun is to treat it like the release of a legit music festival and have people comment things they like or dislike about the lineup.  As such, comments are greatly appreciated on each post in the series.

 

I look forward to experiencing this series with you and hope you enjoy it as much as I do!