Along with putting Irvine’s Great Park on the entertainment destination map, Olivia Rodrigo‘s one-day Daisy Chain Fields Music Festival is expected to net about $517,000 for the city.
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Irvine, the county’s second-largest city, probably best known for its universities and suburbia, was thrust into the entertainment spotlight in June when Rodrigo announced the Great Park grounds would host her debut festival. City officials said she’s toured the park multiple times and has been hands on with creating the vision for its transformation.
When the music goes live Aug. 29, the city will see its most high-profile headliners as of yet, city officials said. Rodrigo is set to perform alongside an all-female lineup that includes Chappell Roan, Doechii, Garbage, Mitski, Stevie Nicks and more. The event — net proceeds will go toward nonprofits uplifting women and girls — sold out within just 30 minutes of its ticket presale and is expected to bring more than 45,000 people to the Great Park.
“For the longest time, you got the people that are like, ‘There’s nothing out there, there’s just a balloon and sports fields,” Irvine’s Director of Communications and Engagement Melissa Haley said. “And we’ve been trying really hard now to flip that script.”
Together, the city of Irvine, PSQ Productions, which manages the Great Park Live amphitheater, and C3 Presents, an event promotion and production company also behind the Governors Ball Music Festival and Lollapalooza, will put on the show.
PSQ Productions will handle the Great Park Live venue, which will be turned into the Marigold Stage and up its capacity from 10,000 to accommodate the extra crowds. C3 Presents will be responsible for the bulk of the festival set-up and management, including trucking in and raising the Dandelion main stage.
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As part of the agreement reached with the city, C3 Presents is renting the Great Park grounds for $45,000, which will close the park, Great Park Ice and Wild Rivers to the public, and will also pay $7,500 for load-in and load-out days and $150,000 for a food and beverage buyout.
C3 Presents is also covering all staffing costs, including hours accrued for the festival by the Irvine Police Department.
The city’s also getting $30 per parking ticket sold; there will be about 3,000 on-site parking spots for the event. The bulk of the city’s profit will come from ticket sales. At $5 per ticket sold, that pencils out to about $225,000.
For scale, the Great Park Live amphitheater, which was raised to fill a gap left by the FivePoint Amphitheater’s closure in 2023, made about $63,000 on average per event last year, a city staff report said. Events still to come this year include “Total Vibes Live” with artists Keyshia Cole, Mario and Pretty Ricky, and “For You Fest,” a weekend event revolving around social media creators.
“People are pursuing us now,” Haley said, “and that’s exactly what we’ve been trying to get to.”
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