For eight years St. Louis' signature music festival was LouFest, a small, but growing two-day festival featuring a variety of rock, blues, rap and country.
LouFest 2018 was slated for the weekend of September 9. About a week prior, we started hearing rumors that LouFest wasn't going to happen. We sent reporters to look at the festival grounds and it didn't appear that anything was going on. The organizers claimed that everything was fine and the show would go on, but we kept hearing otherwise.
Our arts reporter, Jeremy Goodwin, started calling various vendors to see if he could find someone to talk about the festival's status. He finally found three vendors who verified the same story: Listen Live Entertainment, the festival's organizer, hadn't been paying its vendors on time. One of our sources had pulled out of the festival after 2017 because of how Listen Live treated him. We reported on the problems that day and LouFest organizers responded that the show was still a go.
A few days later, that all changed. Festival organizers announced late at night via Twitter that the event was cancelled. They blamed the weather, money problems and negative media coverage.
We turned a feature that day explaining what happened and what the reaction was from fans, vendors and musicians. Jeremy also appeared on St. Louis On The Air, our daily talk show, explaining events and he provided news spots for our newscast. All of those elements are included in this sound file.
