Madison Square Garden Entertainment Music Festival

Madison Square Garden Entertainment has picked a site in rural Springfield, N.Y. for its first multi-genre music festival in 2010. It will be a $15 million purchase for the 910 acre plot of land. This seemingly huge price tag will cover start-up, maintenance and infrastructure costs, not talent or yearly budgets.

Madison Square Garden Entertainment has picked a site in rural Springfield, N.Y. for its first multi-genre music festival in 2010. It will be a $15 million purchase for the 910 acre plot of land. This seemingly huge price tag will cover start-up, maintenance and infrastructure costs, not talent or yearly budgets.

Purchasing the site is the first step to creating MSGE’s own music fest.

“The actual site, the rolling hills, green fields, farmlands, it just has a very beautiful vibe to it, which is obviously a very important aspect when you’re looking at festival sites,” MSGE Senior VP Don Simpson said.

The location of the site seems to calm Simpson of the worries some might have of the slumping festival business this year.

“Obviously, we’re looking at an area in the Northeast where there isn’t one of these large, three-day festivals, and we feel with the population base within that vicinity we have a lot of people to draw from.”

The presently unnamed festival will be a camping one similar to Bonnaroo, and although it has been set for 2010, no specific date has been decided upon yet.

“We won’t get narrowed down to an actual date until we get closer,” says Simpson. “We want to review what’s in the marketplace, what’s in the area to compete with in regard to any other local attractions. And it’s also a function of when you’re ready to go.”

As for the music that can be expected at the festival, Simpson says that it will be “contemporary popular music, which is going to be a broad scale.”

But before any decisions can be made about the entertainment bookings at his festival, there are still some processes Simpson has to go through before making it final, such as the New York State Environmental Quality Review. But that’s not to say that Simpson isn’t already thinking about the future.

When asked if MSGE would have future festivals, Simpson replied, “You never know.”