The Made In America festival is canceled again this year

For the second year in a row, the Made in America festival has been canceled.

The 2024 version of the festival — which is curated by Jay-Z, and produced by his entertainment company Roc Nation in partnership with concert promoter Live Nation — has been called off.

The announcement was made on the festival’s social media accounts just after noon on Wednesday. “Made in America will not take place in 2024,” the statement read. It went on to say that “As purveyors of change, the Made in America executive production team is reimagining a live music experience that affirms our love and dedication to music and the work we do. We promise an exciting return to the festival.”

Made in America was first staged on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia in 2012, with Jay-Z and Pearl Jam as headliners. It continued every year on Labor Day weekend until it was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, then resumed the following year. It was last staged in 2022, when Puerto Rican rap star Bad Bunny headlined the closing night of the festival, which drew a crowd of 50,000 to the main stage set up in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Rocky Steps.

Last year, MIA was canceled in August, after Lizzo, one of the two scheduled headliners along with SZA, was sued by many of her dancers on accusations of harassment, though no official reason was given for the festival’s cancellation.

The news that MIA is off this year comes at a time when large-scale multi-day music festivals, which grew to be a dominant force in the concert industry in the 2000s and 2010s, have struggled in the years since the pandemic, even as the concert industry as a whole has bounded back behind big name acts such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.

Delaware’s Firefly Festival, which was also founded in 2012, drew diminished crowds in 2022 and took a planned year off last year. In February, it was announced that the festival is again canceled this year. While the Xponential Music Festival, the annual festival presented by radio station WXPN-FM (88.5) has carried on in its new spot on the concert calendar in September, its is now a smaller gathering, with bands playing only the more intimate Wiggins Park in Camden, and not also occupying the adjacent Freedom Mortgage Pavilion.

The Philadelphia exception is the Roots Picnic, which has grown in recent years from one day to two, with the gathering curated by and starring the Philly hip-hop band once again scheduled to take over the expanded campus of the Mann Center in Fairmount Park with a bill that includes Lil Wayne, André 300, Jill Scott, and others.

The cancelation means a major loss of revenue for the city and festival workers, for the second year in a row.

Last year, Michael Barnes, president of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 8, said that MIA generated about $1 million a year from the festival, making it the union’s largest annual live event.

“People count on that,” he said. “For that to cancel within weeks of the concert is overly impactful to the live event and entertainment workers.”

“The people who are most impacted by this are our frontline employees. The bellmen, the housekeepers, the restaurant employees, the bartenders,” Ed Grose, executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Hotel Association, told The Inquirer last year.

Before MIA, Labor Day weekend was traditionally a slow time for Philadelphia hotels, with summer vacationers enjoying one last weekend at the beach. But in 2021, AirBnB said Philadelphia was its third-most popular-city on Labor Day Weekend.

In 2018, when MIA was under threat to be moved off the Ben Franklin Parkway and perhaps leave Philadelphia, Jay-Z wrote a commentary for The Inquirer and Daily News, saying: “We are disappointed that the mayor of Philadelphia would evict us from the heart of the city.”

He said that, up to that point, the festival had a $102.8 million economic impact on the city in its first six years. The festival paid the city $3.4 million in rent from 2012 to 2017, he said, and employed more than 1,000 local residents every day of the festivals.

Inflation has skyrocketed since then. Jeff Apruzzese, director of the music industry program at Drexel University and former bassist for Passion Pit, pointed to a 2023 study that showed Bonnaroo, the four-day festival held in Tennessee, pumped more than $339.8 million into the local economy, including more than $5.1 million in tax revenue.

Made in America, Apruzzese said, is ”probably within that same ballpark,” considering how many people it brings into the city and how much money those visitors spend.

But there are costs, too: Philadelphia paid $1.54 million in festival-related services in 2022, the last year it was held, a city spokesperson said last year, with MIA reimbursing the city $627,000.

The Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau said it could not provide projections or insight into the economic impact because it is not involved with booking the event.

Inquirer staff writer Erin McCarthy contributed to this article.