The long-running country music tradition returns to Austin\u2019s Germania Insurance Amphitheater as part of a compressed version of the annual Outlaw Music Festival, which Nelson founded in 2016. It was created to bring a scaled-down taste of the picnic to other cities. In addition to the Austin stop, the fest has dates in Irving on July 3 and The Woodlands on July 5.<\/p>\n
For the Austin show, Willie Nelson and Family will be joined by a star-studded lineup including bluegrass star Billy Strings, Wilco, Sheryl Crow, Lukas Nelson, Stephen Wilson Jr., Margo Price, Rodney Crowell and Lily Meola.<\/p>\n
The Fourth of July Picnic was inspired by the Dripping Springs Reunion<\/a>, a slapdash, honky-tonk Woodstock that lured the Red-Headed Stranger to Texas in the mid-1970s. First held in Dripping Springs in 1973, the event has been a Texas music tradition for more than 50 years.<\/p>\n \u201cBlue dot fever\u201d<\/a> is a music industry term for musicians canceling tour dates and concerts due to poor ticket sales. It gets its name from the mass of blue dots marking thousands of empty, unsold seats in large arenas and stadiums on online ticketing retailers like Ticketmaster.<\/p>\n With about a week and a half to go before the Fourth of July Picnic, swaths of seats are vacant at the amphitheater inside Circuit of the Americas. Spots on the general admission lawn are around $70, while floor seats are almost $400.<\/p>\n Reddit users speculated<\/a> that the sluggish ticket sales may have something to do with the venue\u2019s lack of shade, which can leave attendees baking in the July sun. They also cite expensive tickets, parking fees and concession prices.<\/p>\n \u201cYou couldn\u2019t pay me to sit in the sun all day surrounded by concrete while the venue shills $9 water you need to keep breathing,\u201d u\/TheDevilleHimself<\/a> wrote.<\/p>\n Redditor u\/Gzilla75<\/a> commented that \u201cblue dot fever\u201d for a Willie Nelson show in Austin could be a canary in the coal mine. Other major tours are struggling with ticket sale<\/a>s amid an economic squeeze and rising concert-going costs, but Nelson shows are usually an exception \u2014 especially in Texas.<\/p>\n While the empty seats may raise questions about the health of the concert economy, they could also lead to more ticket giveaways or discounts as the event approaches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The long-running country music tradition returns to Austin\u2019s Germania Insurance Amphitheater as part of a compressed version of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350312,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-350311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}