In celebration of the festival’s 25th anniversary, Lollapalooza will become a four-day festival. With the addition of Thursday, the festival will now take place 7/28-7/31 and will feature over 170 musical acts, according to the festival’s twitter account.
Founder Perry Farrell posted the news on Lollapalooza’s website, stating the following:
“It’s our 25th Anniversary and we wanted to do something really special and different for our fans. There’s a lot of really great music coming out in 2016; with the abundance of talent that wanted to help us celebrate 25 years we got to thinking… ‘How are we going to fit all those great artists in one weekend?’ Then we thought about what a special day Thursday has become. When the party can’t wait for the weekend, the movers and shakers make it happen on Thursday! So, we’ve put together an entire additional day of music to celebrate our milestone year. It’s going to be a fantastic party!”
The fourth day will naturally affect Chicago concertgoers in a number of ways. Firstly, the extra day will increase the price of a general-admission pass for the festival from $250 in 2015 to $335 in 2016. Secondly, the popularity of Thursday night after-shows may be affected, potentially pushing acts looking to perform outside of the festival even earlier into the week.
As for whether the quality of acts by day will be affected, we’ll simply have to wait for the lineup announcement, which occurred at the end of March last year. Either way, more bands will be heading to Chicago in July, which no music fan could complain about.
