‘A cutthroat business’: Charlotte music fest is up against competitors, stigmas and storms

No, it’s not Lollapalooza, or Austin City Limits, or Newport Jazz.

But people who get paid to know what they’re talking about will tell you this: The Carolina edition of Breakaway Music Festival — the two-day, two-stage outdoor extravaganza of EDM, house and pop music set for zMAX Dragway at Charlotte Motor Speedway this weekend — deserves to be mentioned in the same breath.

For the past two years, The Hollywood Reporter has carved out space on its list of “The Best Music Festivals” of the year for Breakaway, a growing festival series with stops in several other cities. This will be Year 4 in Charlotte (or Concord, to be more specific).

And yet despite organizers’ hopes that 12,000 fans will come through the gates each day, it’s still a niche event serving a niche crowd.

If you’re younger than 30, there’s a better chance you’re familiar with Breakaway. If you’re older than 40, those chances drop off precipitously. Such is the nature of EDM, a genre of music driven not by singers, songwriters or traditional musicians, but rather by DJs and music producers using computers to create pulsating tracks that make (predominantly) younger adults wanna dance.

On the eve of Breakaway Carolina, we spoke with Jarrod Fucci — the 33-year-old Charlotte resident who took over as Breakaway Music Festival president just over a year ago — about the joys and challenges of the event.

Based on the conversation, here are five key takeaways about Breakaway, from the lineup and the location to stigmas and storms.

1. As EDM talent goes, Breakaway’s is A-list

Fucci characterized the names on the bill as “Super Bowl” level, and if you know your EDM, you know he’s right.

Saturday night’s headliners — Fisher, Knock2 and Loud Luxury — are perhaps less-known among more-mainstream music fans. But Friday night in particular features some of the genre’s heaviest hitters. Over the past decade-plus, Friday-night headliner Alesso has made hits with Tove Lo, Hailee Steinfeld, Florida Georgia Line and Katy Perry, while his co-headliner for the evening — Marshmello — has attained superstar status thanks to collaborations with Selena Gomez, Chris Brown, Halsey, Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers.

“Dance music is nothing new,” Fucci said, “but the explosiveness of dance music over the last decade has been really special.”

He continued: “If you ask someone who maybe is in their mid-, late 40s, they say, ‘Well, dance music is an underground thing. It’s just a lot of noise,’ or, ‘It’s someone up there just pressing buttons up on the stage.’ (But) dance music is such a special art of being able to create music and being able to bring in so many other genres. When I think about dance music’s place in music culture right now, I look at dance music as the core, and the epicenter, of all of these other genres of music. Marshmello, he just released a song recently with Kane Brown.

“So we’re starting to bridge this gap. You have artists like Post Malone who are kind of veering all over the place, in and out of music. And dance music has this really unique ability to adapt and collaborate with other genres. You see a lot of dance music participating in country, in pop, in hip-hop — and so we’ll continue, I think, to see the trends grow.

“The underground dance scene,” Fucci said, “is not so underground anymore.”

In addition to Alesso and Marshmello, British EDM duo Chase & Status will be on evening duty Friday. An additional 17 artists — including a handful of local and regional acts — will perform during the daylight hours each day. A complete rundown of the two stages’ set times for the weekend is here .

2. Charlotte has been a great home for the festival

The Breakaway series was founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 2013 and has since expanded to include shows in cities like Bonner Springs, Kan.; St. Paul, Minn.; Grand Rapids, Mich.; and Worcester, Mass.

This past May, a second Breakaway-branded festival — the bass-centric “Another World” spinoff — was launched.

Asked why the company has zeroed in on the Queen City, Fucci explained: “Charlotte is really densely populated with young people who are right in our demographic. We are an all-ages event. We welcome families of all ages. But our core demo is really those juniors and seniors in college, then post-grads; and what we see especially with our model — and I think why we have such a strong place here in Charlotte — is you’ve got all these really great collegiate institutions all around: Columbia, South Carolina, all the way up to Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, that area, and UNC Charlotte.

“And we find that students will fall in love with Breakaway. Then we see these individuals continue to stay in Charlotte, (plus) a lot of people coming from Columbia or Chapel Hill into Charlotte to work, maybe start their careers, get into a little bit more of a city-centric environment for themselves and then just continuing to come to our festivals, because now they’re closer to them than they were before. That 21- to 25-, 26-year-old (demo) is really where we see the lion’s share of attendance.”

He also said EDM-friendly venues like The Fillmore, The Music Yard and Blackbox are helping to promote “the dance music scene continuing to grow in this market.”

More generally, Fucci said, “What’s really unique about Breakaway is we really pride ourselves on bringing global names in dance and pop music to places and towns and cities where people live, work and play every day, as opposed to expecting people to fly to our events as a destination.

“The type of lineups that we pull together are the same lineups that you would go see at an Ultra (Music Festival) in Miami, or maybe EDC, another large electronic festival. But we’re bringing that to (smaller) markets and we’ll continue to expand our program into more markets next year, adding some really, really cool cities that we’re excited to announce in just a few weeks.”

3. What they’ve built hasn’t been built easily

It’s not just that the 2020 festival here was canceled due to Covid, or that the 2022 festival was pushed to the spring of 2023 due to a hurricane. It’s pretty much a constant struggle — but it’s one Breakaway seems to be winning.

”You’ve got independents (like us),” Fucci said, “and then your larger festival series that are typically promoted and managed by companies like Live Nation, AEG — great, great companies. They have their space, we have ours. (But) it is becoming harder and harder for independent festivals to exist and compete with (them).”

On top of that, Breakaway’s “Another World” festival in May had unexpected competition from the inaugural Lovin’ Life Music Fest .

Fucci said he was “excited that we have another property here in this market. A lot of people — friends, colleagues, whatever — were like, ‘Wow, you guys have competition. What are you gonna do?’ (In my opinion) it’s great. I think that there (are) enough people who live in this market that this market can tolerate multiple events.”

At the same time, he added: “At large, festivals, it is a pretty cutthroat business.”

4. ‘Safety is paramount for us’

Fucci emphasized wanting to create a safe environment for festivalgoers several times over the course of his 40-minute conversation with The Charlotte Observer.

And when we asked him about the stigmatization of EDM concerts — which some people associate with raves, which some people associate with heavy recreational drug use — he didn’t flinch.

Yes, Fucci admitted: “Dance music in general has this stigma of being this seedy underground rave, where maybe the perception is that they’re overconsuming, or they’re participating in recreational drug use or whatever it may be. Is that happening at our events? It is impossible for us to say no, right? I mean, the same thing happens every night at 50 different locations in South End. We just happen to aggregate 12,000 people at the same time. So of course. People do sometimes maybe have a little bit too much fun at our events.

“What I can say is a few things. One, I will continue to reiterate it for everyone that we talk to is: Safety is paramount for us. All of our teams are trained to see what overconsumption looks like, and so it’s our role in being the operator of our events to make sure that our teams know how to respond to maybe someone who’s having a little bit too much fun. Or if they maybe try and come have an extra drink, we would say, ‘Hey, maybe we skip this one and you should just enjoy the show for a little bit.’ Or, ‘Hey, do you need to take a beat?’ We’ve got an amazing medical services team. We are not out to get people. We are absolutely here to keep people safe.”

He also said Breakaway has partnered with the nonprofit End Overdose , which has a “mission of preventing and responding to overdoses.” That means several people on site will have been trained to recognize the signs of an opioid overdose and administer the opioid overdose reversal drug Naloxone.

“We have a real responsibility for people’s safety,” Fucci said, “and we watch really, really closely.”

5. As for the weather, it’ll be what it’ll be

There won’t be a repeat of 2022, when Hurricane Ian chased Breakaway away from the fall.

Saturday’s forecast, as of Wednesday, looked terrific. But Tropical Storm Helene could bring rain and flooding during the day on Friday ...

In any event, Fucci said, “we are a rain-or-shine event. Of course, we have policies and procedures in place to make sure that if there is lightning in the area, that we don’t conduct the event, that we will temporarily pause, delay our doors. We are always evaluating that. We have a team of meteorologists that we work with that are always watching over us. They’re always texting, calling, sending me screenshots. They all sit at home and watch our events from afar.”

And in the end, he said, “I can’t change the weather.” Whatever it is, “I accept it — and we keep it moving.”

Breakaway Music Festival (Carolina)

When: Friday and Saturday. The first artists take the stages at 4 p.m.

Where: zMAX Dragway at Charlotte Motor Speedway, 6570 Bruton Smith Blvd., Concord.

Tickets: $104 and up for single-day general-admission, and $189 and up for both days. Parking is an additional $25-$35.

Details: breakawayfestival.com/carolina .