Los Angeles’ Fool In Love Festival Aims to Draw Baby Boomer Crowds
4 mins read

Los Angeles’ Fool In Love Festival Aims to Draw Baby Boomer Crowds

This past weekend, Los Angeles hosted the inaugural Fool in Love music festival. While the landscape of major music events — especially in California — may seem too saturated for anything new to break through, that’s not entirely true. There’s clearly still room for interesting takes on the music festival concept to succeed, especially if they’re aimed at a different audience.

Fool in Love clearly aimed to reach a crowd that hadn’t been to a music festival in years…or maybe ever. The event showcased a lineup of the biggest soul, R&B, and pop stars of the past era. Headliners included Lionel Richie and Diana Ross, and featured performances from well-known artists like Santana, Al Green, Chaka Khan, Nile Rodgers, Smokey Robinson, and dozens more.

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Fool in Love is one of the few music festivals that hopes to appeal to an audience that isn’t typically served by that segment of the concert industry. There were certainly millennials in attendance, and even some Gen Xers, but the audience was mostly boomers — fans who remember the acts on the bill at their best and have the money to spend on experiences like this one.

In some ways, Fool in Love is a brilliant idea. Very few companies have ever tried to create a complete music festival (or at least a similar experience) for this older demographic. It seemed unattainable, with many assuming they simply weren’t interested in such a show. The programming helps C3 Presents, the company behind the event, reach consumers who were previously largely untapped.

Fool in Love looked and felt like many of its competitors, although there were some significant differences. Of course, the food and drink options, portable toilets, and the like were similar to what you might find at a smaller version of Coachella in any city. At this festival, many attendees brought their own lawn chairs, since these fans aren’t the type to stand around in the hot sun all day. It was quieter and more sedate than most of these events, although many of the older attendees were clearly having a great time.

As a concert experience, the results were mixed. The performances weren’t all great, but that was to be expected. Many of the headline acts who took the stage are in their 70s and even 80s, so they simply can’t put on the kind of show they used to decades—even half a century—ago.

For example, Ross let her backing vocals do most of the work for some songs. Carlos Santana spent most of his performance sitting around and not looking particularly enthusiastic about it. Dionne Warwick’s voice didn’t hold up very well, and Gladys Knight seemed to have trouble even remembering the lyrics to “Midnight Train to Georgia” because she kept seeking help from her backing vocalists.

While none of these artists are at their peak, seeing them live is a spectacle. Names like Ross, Richie, Warwick and Knight are legends with countless timeless hits in their discography. They aren’t getting any younger and there may not be many more opportunities to see them live. Even if they weren’t at their peak, just being in their presence was worth the price of admission.