Every September, tens of thousands of music listeners attend Atlanta’s Music Midtown Festival in Piedmont Park. Last year, the festival had 50,000 people show up to the two-day event. Fans were anticipating the festival’s headliners including Future, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance and Jack White until Music Midtown producers announced that the event would be cancelled this year.
“Hey Midtown fans – due to circumstances beyond our control, Music Midtown will no longer be taking place this year. We were looking forward to reuniting in September and hope we can all get back to enjoying the festival together again soon,” the festival announced on its social media platforms.
The reasoning behind this sudden shutdown was because of a Georgia court ruling that permits Georgians to carry firearms on public grounds. This idea stems from a 2014 state law that allows Georgia residents to carry firearms in places they could not before, such as a public park. It resulted in later confusion on whether privately hosted festivals on public grounds had the ability to restrict guns from their events, so the law was later revisited in 2019 by the Georgia Supreme Court. Private groups now struggle to prevent guns from short-term events, meaning the festival had no way of restricting firearms from entering the festival because Piedmont Park is owned by the city of Atlanta.
The loss of the 2022 festival not only disappointed attendees who had been looking forward to the upcoming event, but the loss of revenue caused a big hit to the local economy. Music Midtown has yet to release a statement on what its plans are for the following years, but hopefully, this beloved event since 1994 can make its comeback.
