Is This Show a Music Festival?

It’s So Hard To Tell!

Festival season is out of control, you guys.

Dozens of musical festivals have already gone down this year — including Paste‘s Untapped: Fort Worth, the Fort Worth Music Festival, Suburbia Music Festival, JMBLYA, Homegrown Music and Arts Festival, Richardson’s Wildflower Festival, Radfest, Rageville, March Madness Music Festival, Big Folkin’ Festival, Spillover and South by So What. And those are just the beginning!

Still ahead are the Elm Street Music & Tattoo Festival, Dia de los Toadies, Clearfork Festival, the Pegasus Music Festival, Summer Cut, Oaktopia and Index Fest — just to name a very few.

So what, exactly, constitutes a quote-unquote music festival these days? What makes the five-band bill of acts performing at Verizon Theatre as part of this month’s Pegasus Music Festival more fest-like than when half-a-dozen hip-hop acts share a bill in Deep Ellum on any given weekend?

Seriously: What the fuck is a music festival anyway? How can you tell when you’re at one?

Hopefully, as we move forward, the following chart will help you discern the difference between a run-of-the-mill show and a bonafide festival.