The Town of Carrboro is announcing the cancellation of the 2021 Carrboro Music Festival. The festival was scheduled to be held on September 25-26 at venues throughout downtown Carrboro.
When planning for the event began earlier this year, there was the hope that the newly-available vaccines would move us in the direction of being able to offer our traditional event which has featured 150-200 acts at over 20 venues and drawn thousands of people into the downtown area to enjoy a full day of live music.
Since that time, the Delta variant has created a much different situation. At this time, all of our surrounding counties are now classified as either ‘Very High Risk’ or ‘Extremely High Risk’ of transmission to unvaccinated community members, so the idea of bringing in potentially a couple of thousand festival attendees is of concern, especially for our community members who are immunocompromised or unable to be vaccinated.
As a result of the uncertainty the pandemic has caused, we have some venues that closed since our last in-person festival. While we were excited to partner with some great new venues, some of the community’s favorite outdoor spots were not available this year.
Additionally, as we have been communicating with our performers, their safety is paramount and crowded performances, particularly within indoor venues, is a concern. Both locally and regionally, we have seen events cancelled or greatly reduced in scale in recent weeks. Our goal for this year has been to try and offer a festival that continues to offer a wide-variety of music and accommodates as many of the performers who applied as possible.
While we were hopeful and very excited for the opportunity to return with our traditional event, our number one priority is the safety of our performers, our volunteers, the staff of our participating venues, and the overall community.
We appreciate everyone who is a part of this event, especially all of the great musicians as well as our partnering venues and sponsors.
Stay safe and we look forward to seeing everyone for next year’s event, which is scheduled for Sunday, October 3, 2022.
