Aftershock sells out Sacramento hotel rooms. Can other music festivals repeat this success?
The Aftershock music festival sold out hotels in the Sacramento region.
Almost all 12,000 hotel rooms in the Sacramento metro area were full Oct. 5-9, the dates of the four-day festival, said Mike Testa, president and CEO of Visit Sacramento.
He noted that the festival started out as a one-day event in 2012, attracting less than 12,000 people. Testa said the festival sells about 40,000 tickets per day.
Testa and his team are trying to figure out how to do the same for GoldenSky, the county music festival taking place this weekend.
Testa said it will take time to grow the festival, which started in 2022.
Chamie McCurry, chief marketing officer for Danny Wimmer Presents, which runs both GoldenSky and AfterShock, said advanced ticket ticket sales for GoldenSky at are at 30,000 a day, up from 25,000 in the festival’s inaugural year.
But Testa said GoldenSky is attracting mainly locals, the same scenario that originally happened for Aftershock.
He said it takes word of mouth for music festivals to attract a more broad audience.
“What’s interesting about Aftershock is that 65% of attendees come from outside the Sacramento area,” he said. “So of all the events we do in a year, this fills the most hotel rooms.”
The festival can’t grow much, however, because Discovery Park, the site of the festival, only has a capacity of 40,000 a night.
Aftershock organizers said Thursday and Sunday where the only days where several hundred tickets were unsold.
Testa said Visit Sacramentodata is showing Aftershock is attracting visitors from all 50 states and 35 countries.
