After announcing their lineup for the 10th anniversary of the festival, Blues, Brews and BBQ has decided to not move forward on this year’s installment of the event.
Citing financial concerns and other elements of planning — you can read their full statement here:
It is with the deepest sadness that we have to make the following announcement…
The Champaign Blues, Brews and BBQ Festival is difficult to manage and an expensive process to deliver. We’d love nothing more than to put the 10th anniversary event together for everyone but it’s just not financially viable. With that said, we have made the very difficult decision not to proceed with the festival in 2017.
We have all worked very hard at building a great music event for our community so the last thing we wanted to do was to cancel the show or push ahead with anything less than an amazing event. Decisions like this are really tough to make and we have spent a long time considering all of our options. We had to consider our costs to date as well as our patrons and their experience, and felt we wouldn’t be able to deliver an event that would represent the Blues, Brews and BBQ Festival name properly.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the amazing and generous team of people that have worked so hard for many years to make the past nine events happen. We extend our thanks to the numerous sponsors, artists, agents and talent that have helped us throughout the years. We also want to express our sincerest apologies to the artists that were supposed to appear this year, we are very sorry we could not make this work and absolutely hate that we cannot go on.
Most of all we want to say thank you to all of our loyal fans and friends that have supported us over the past nine years… you made the Champaign Blues, Brews and BBQ so incredibly special while it lasted and we will miss each and every one you. Thank You!!
While the future of the festival remains unclear, we’ll see if they decide to come back to the table in 2018.
Executive Editor
