An aerial shot of J. Cole’s Dreamville Festival in 2024. Photo Credit: Sam Shapiro Media
Dreamville has joined 2024’s long list of shelved music festivals, as the forthcoming 2025 installment has been confirmed as the “fifth and final edition.”
J. Cole’s Dreamville Festival just recently took to social media to reveal the cancellation news, with its presale having only kicked off this morning. At the time of writing – and despite many fans’ concerns about scoring tickets – general admission presale passes were still available for $299.99 a pop.
Scheduled to take place on April 5th and 6th, 2025, the Raleigh event is set to unveil its full lineup sometime before 2024’s conclusion, per organizers.
Previously, the festival in 2024 attracted north of 100,000 total attendees across both days, according once again to organizers. Even with the seemingly strong ticket sales at hand (and a described $145 million impact on the local economy), however, Dreamville has left little doubt about the plans to wrap in 2025.
“From the very beginning,” the festival’s announcement reads, “the idea behind the fest was creating a place where our fans, the Dreamville community, could spend time together, a place where they could see themselves reflected, a place to share in experiences. Let’s run it back one more time in April!”
Absent from Dreamville’s message is a specific reason for the decision, though multiple fans are indicating that J. Cole had previously alluded to the move.
More immediately, organizers have canceled, postponed, or otherwise failed to deliver over 170 music festivals on the year – with Cambridge Club Festival having called off its 2025 event earlier in December.
DMN Pro is tracking the growing pile of cancellations and has further broken down the possible reasons for the less-than-ideal situation. There are several layers to that involved analysis, but at the top level, it’s worth reiterating the ultra-crowded festival landscape that arrived post-COVID.
To be sure, on the heels of well-documented ticket sales for all manner of festivals and shows, four short days will separate Dreamville’s end and the start of Coachella 2025’s first weekend. Stagecoach 2025 is also booked for April, and May is expected to bring EDC Las Vegas, to name a few of many examples.
Running with the point, the slowdown isn’t sparing leading festivals. Coachella rather conspicuously failed to sell out in 2024, and despite its stacked lineup, the 2025 installment’s ticket sales have proven sluggish thus far. Individual opening-weekend GA passes took a relatively long time to sell out, and their second-weekend counterparts were still available at the time of writing.
