Our 2022 Annual Report wraps with the announcement of Louder Than Life as our Festival of the Year. All December long, we’ve been publishing lists and interviews that reflect on the best music, film, and TV of 2022. You can find it all in one place here.
In a year that music festivals were back in full swing following a shutdown in 2020 and a sporadic return in 2021, fans had plenty of choices of where to spend their hard-earned money in 2022. For rockers and metalheads, perhaps no other destination in the States offered a lineup as strong as Louder Than Life, Consequence’s 2022 Festival of the Year.
The four-day fest at Louisville’s Kentucky Exposition Center boasted headliners Nine Inch Nails, Slipknot, KISS, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, in addition to such acts as Rob Zombie, Alice in Chains, Bring Me the Horizon, Tenacious D, Evanescence, Mastodon, and more. That alone was likely enough to draw a whopping attendance of 170,000 over four days. But a lineup poster does not a festival make. It takes planning, execution, and even a little luck to pull off a gathering of this size, and Louder Than Life scored on all three.
As far as the luck aspect, the weather was phenomenal, a blessing for a festival that has seen its share of meteorological misfortunes in the past. But that part is out of the hands of promoter Danny Wimmer Presents. What is in the company’s control is offering fans a memorable experience while keeping the train rolling for four straight days. And that’s where DWP excelled.
Considering that the future of music festivals was up in the air when the concert industry shut down two years ago, it’s nothing short of amazing that Louder Than Life broke its attendance record in ’22. “We never feared that festivals wouldn’t be coming back,” Danny Wimmer Presents Chief Marketing Officer Chamie McCurry tells Consequence. “It was the fear of the unknown of the timing and information, and how it was changing so rapidly. We always had our eyes on bringing our festivals back.”
One of the aspects that stood out for Louder Than Life, in terms of both the lineup and the staging, was that it rivaled some of the European festivals that American fans had always dreamed about, especially when it comes to hard rock and metal. Bills for festivals like Download, Rock Am Ring, and Hellfest have left US fans drooling, but this year’s Louder Than Life was finally able to bring a similar experience stateside.
