After a long hiatus, Carowinds is getting back into the concert business. Will it succeed?

When Carowinds announced back in March that the amusement park was launching a hugely ambitious multi-weekend summer music festival , it would have been easy to greet the news with at least a little bit of skepticism.

After all, the last time Carowinds’ Paladium hosted a “mainstream” music concert — nine full years ago — things did not go so well.

“They’re missing a party, don’t they know?” former “American Idol” star Chris Daughtry said in July 2015 to the dismal turnout of roughly 2,000 fans inside the park’s 13,000-seat venue, referring to the much, much larger crowd of folks enjoying the various rides and attractions behind it.

“Get the hell off of the roller coaster! The roller coaster sucks!” he shouted in jest.

It marked the second time in less than a year that Carowinds had tried to breathe new life into the old amphitheater, and the second time it had come up short. In 2014, when Scotty McCreery (another “American Idol” alum) took the stage there as the first “mainstream” artist to perform at the Paladium since pop duo Aly & AJ in 2006, fans only filled about one-eighth of the Paladium.

So after the Daughtry disappointment, Carowinds largely gave up, leaving the live-music business to others, and thereby leaving the Paladium mostly dormant.

“We continued to be pretty successful with the Christian music concerts,” like the annual Christian Music Day and the annual JoyFest, says Brian Oerding, Carowinds’ assistant general manager. But otherwise, only “small pieces of entertainment were happening there. We’d have some large church groups that would rent it out, we’d have some cheerleading competitions that would rent it out.”

Still, there was always a nagging feeling that opportunities were being wasted.

“To be honest with you, as far as what to do with that space, we’d been having conversations for years ,” Oerding explains. The gist of the discussions, he says, were along the lines of, “‘What can we do? We need to utilize this space. We’ve got it. We have a lot of things to do. And a lot of people come and visit us. But, man, it can get crowded in the park sometimes. Well, look at this! We’ve got another place to put 14,000 people that won’t interfere with you waiting in line for Fury.’”

And ultimately, he says, it came down to this: “Should we try a concert series, and can it be successful?”

Carowinds decided, of course, that the answer to the first question was a resounding yes. Its Summer Music Fest kicks off this weekend — with country star LeAnn Rimes on Friday and rocker Bret Michaels on Saturday. In the coming weeks, it will also feature headliners like Carly Pearce, Sugar Ray and Flo Rida.

As for the second question? Here are several things that may be worth considering as we await an answer in the coming weeks.

1. The Paladium’s glory days were pretty darn glorious. Opened in 1975 as one of the first permanent concert facilities built at a major theme park, the venue spent summers in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s hosting a laundry list of artists now considered legends, from B.B. King to Jimmy Buffett, from Tom Petty to Tina Turner. Heart. Hall & Oates. Dylan. Santana. Patti LaBelle. Peter Frampton. And on and on. But ...

2. After the turn of the century, really, the Paladium started to lose its mojo. “The concert business got really, really hard and very, very competitive,” says Matt Shafer, vice president of business development and strategic alliances for Ohio-based Cedar Fair Entertainment Company, which owns and operates Carowinds. “You saw all these other venues popping up around, and it just got to be a very complicated business for us as an amusement park company. ... The concept of a guest having to pay for a ticket to Carowinds and then a concert ticket on top of it, it’s a hard model. It doesn’t really work that way.”

3. So they’re trying a different model. For the Daughtry and McCreery concerts, fans got free admission to the park with the purchase of a concert ticket, with pricing for seats ranging from $20 to $110. The 10 Paladium shows — two each weekend, spread out across five of the next six — work the other way around: All are “free” with paid admission to the park itself. Unlike the “Idols” shows, seating for the new Carowinds Summer Music Fest is general admission instead of pre-selected (more on that in a minute); but the bottom line is that you could theoretically see all 10 upcoming Paladium concerts for just $105 total, which is the price of the $105 base-level “season pass” to Carowinds. That’s a fairly remarkable deal. (By the way, single-day admission prices are $60 after fees, and parking is $30 per car. To a large extent, a “season pass” becomes even harder to argue with simply because it includes free parking.) “There’s lots of places you can go see music or hear music,” Shafer says. “There’s also places you can go ride roller coasters. But there’s very few you can do the same and with just one ticket.”

4. And it’s an obvious but still shrewd bit of cross-promotion, actually. “The reason we decided to partner it with park admission,” Shafer says, is “because that helps bring awareness to the park, as well. You’re on the Carowinds website to get your LeAnn Rimes ticket, and now you’re also going, ‘Oh, look at this amusement park that’s right here.’ In other words, our hope is that maybe you’ll come for a concert, but you’ll stay for the roller coaster, and you’ll come back again for the funnel cakes.”

5. Yes, you can sit anywhere you want. However, the roughly 1,000 best seats will only be available to those with special wristbands (also free) that can be picked up on the day of the show as soon as the park opens at 10 a.m. They’ll be distributed till they’re gone at the Thrill Zone Stage, which is deep inside of Carowinds instead of near the front entrance — the idea being, says park communications director Courtney McGarry Weber, that “we want people who really want the seats to go get them, as opposed to people just walking by and being like, ‘Oh, something’s free!’ and grabbing one.” Just be aware of the fact that the actual Paladium gates don’t open until 5 p.m.

6. Oh, and yes, short attention spans are welcome. “People can pop in and out” of a show, says Brian Oerding of Carowinds. “They can watch a couple of their favorite songs if they want, then catch a couple of their favorite rides, and kind of go back and forth. Again, we have that unique ability that just a traditional concert venue doesn’t have.”

7. The venue has been spruced up throughout. This includes fresh paint in several places, some new concession stands, a small beer garden, new lights, and perhaps most notably, two new video boards flanking the stage.

8. Shows should end at a reasonable hour. Whereas concerts at other major venues in Charlotte often run till 11 p.m., most headliners at the Paladium will wrap at about 10, the park’s normal closing time.

9. They’re planning to bring the festival back again in 2025. Well ... maybe/hopefully. “Success will be measured in a whole bunch of different ways,” Oerding says. “There’s a financial piece to it, obviously. How much attendance do we have? How much money do we make? But also, what is the guest feedback? What are the comments that we get back from our guests? At the core, what we’re trying to do here is make people happy. ... But we are already in conversations for what happens in Year Two in that space. I think that that is probably going to be something that you and the rest of our guests will find out in the near future.”

Carowinds Summer Music Fest lineup

Friday, July 5: LeAnn Rimes with Johnnyswim.

Saturday, July 6: Bret Michaels’ “Parti-Gras” tour with Dee Snider, Steve Augeri, Great White and Slaughter.

Friday, July 19: Carly Pearce with Niko Moon and Hannah Ellis.

Saturday, July 20: TobyMac with Tenth Avenue North.

Friday, July 26: Brett Young with Restless Road.

Saturday, July 27: Brantley Gilbert with Lauren Alaina.

Friday, Aug. 2: Skillet with 10 Years.

Saturday, Aug. 3: Sugar Ray with Better Than Ezra and Tonic.

Friday, Aug. 9: Flo Rida with Blanco Brown.

Saturday, Aug. 10: Russell Dickerson with Tyler Rich.

In addition to the aforementioned headline performances at the Paladium, regional bands and other artists will play on two smaller stages inside the park throughout each of the Fridays and Saturdays listed above.