The recently released lineup for the Revelry Music and Arts Festival has received mixed reactions from students and festival organizers.
Revelry is an annual festival at the University of Wisconsin-Madison run by the Wisconsin Union Directorate that began last spring. This year it will take place May 3 and feature headliners Dillon Francis and Waka Flocka Flame.
Some students expressed excitement about this year’s lineup.
“I didn’t go last year, but I will definitely go this year,” UW-Madison sophomore Allie Lusic said.
Other students were not as excited.
“I don’t really care about it,” Gina Stella, a UW-Madison junior, said.
Bess Donoghue, the Revelry Public Relations Manager, said the artists were chosen based on student surveys on musical preference, popularity within certain genres and artist availability.
“We think the lineup combines all of the different tastes and genres that people were interested in seeing,” Donoghue said.
Comparing the planning process for the event this year to last year, Donoghue said she thought deciding on the artists and contacting them earlier was the most helpful lesson she and the Revelry team learned. Josh Levin, the Executive Director of Revelry, said he thought the student surveys made the biggest improvement.
“If you look through social media from the other day, when the lineup was announced, and, say, on Twitter you looked up Revelry, the amount of positive comments largely outweighed the negative comments,” Levin said.
Levin said he is pleased with the diverse array of genres the Revelry team booked for the lineup and that he is confident the headliners will be a success.
“There’s no doubt that Waka Flocka and Dillon Francis will both be an awesome time,” Levin said. “And hopefully [it] will just be a giant dance party and everybody will have a great experience.”
