I’ve been waiting for a hot minute to cover this one, and it’s finally here folks!
When I was younger, Warped Tour seemed like the ultimate destination for emo kids like me to gather and lose their collective minds for a few days.
Technically, that wasn’t too far off from the touring festival’s ultimate purpose. Rob Pasalic, guitarist for The Saint Alivia Cartel, said that Warped was, “a place for kids to go and hear all their favorite bands in one day.”
Now, before we get to the tour’s inevitable end (kind of), let’s start with a little history lesson on the background and legacy of Warped Tour.
Warped Tour was the brainchild of Kevin Lyman, with the intent to focus on electronic alternative music. As many already know, the tour would end up focusing mostly on pop punk acts, though it was welcoming of acts from many different genres.
The first Warped Tour took place in 1995, beginning in June in Boise, ID and ending in August in Detroit, MI.
After the first year, Warped got the attention of well-known shoe company Vans, who would go on to sponsor the tour for the rest of its existence. That’s how the tour became known specifically as “Vans Warped Tour.”
Warped Tour expanded to international territory in 1997, with stops in North America, Europe, and even Japan. After 1999, the tour would not make any stops outside of North America again until 2012.
Every year of Warped has its own special little history, but for brevity’s sake, we’ll leave it at this.
In 2018, Kevin Lyman announced that the 2018 tour would be the last full-length run of the tour, with 2019’s run only including 3 events.
Despite the 2018 announcement and the 2019 tour being the official ending of Warped (for the time being, more on that later) the decline of Warped happened years earlier. In my opinion, the major decline started in 2015, with the Austin Jones incident.
Content Warning: conversations of sexual assault, harassment, and grooming
In 2015, pop punk artist and YouTuber Austin Jones was booked to play Warped Tour, but his career began to implode when reports started resurfacing of Jones’ history of sexual misconduct. While Jones was far from the first member of the scene to be accused of inappropriate behavior with fans, the outrage regarding his platform both on YouTube and as a performer at Warped brought the situation to a huge audience.
The situation’s connection to Warped Tour specifically started with a 15-year-old fan starting a Change.org petition to have Jones removed from the Warped lineup as the details of Jones’ behavior was revealed to the public. The petition did not reach its signature goal, but it was enough to pressure Jones into withdrawing on his own volition and admitting to the allegations via YouTube video.
In the years following, Jones would be arrested for multiple crimes related to the 2015 allegations as well as other related crimes. I will spare you the details, as they are not relevant to the overall conversation.
While Jones was on house arrest awaiting trial in 2019, YouTuber deefizzy released a video presenting evidence that none other than Kevin Lyman, among other members of the music industry, had intentionally tried to cover up Jones’ actions.
This was a huge blow to the reputation of Warped Tour, and while Lyman had already stated that Warped Tour was to end by the time he was implicated, the fact that Jones had withdrawn from Warped rather than Warped removing him from the tour themselves was a huge crack in the reputation of the event, which would only grow larger as Jones’ trial went on.
Which leads us into the pseudo-revival of Warped Tour and its current status.
As of now, the last true Warped Tour to take place was 2019, but Chris Fronzac, lead vocalist of the band Atilla, was confirmed in 2020 to have intentions of bringing it back. Lyman has retired from his position at Warped Tour, with Fronzac taking over after buying the rights to the festival in 2020.
Due to some lovely contractual issues that seem to be more than Fronzac had bargained for, Warped Tour could not return – at least, not under the name “Warped Tour” – for three years. This was in 2020, leaving us now at 2023.
In 2021, Fronzac teased the idea of bringing back Warped under a different name in order to continue the spirit of the festival, but nothing seems to have materialized from that.
Despite three years now having passed since the original claims from Fronzac involving legal issues bringing the festival back, I don’t think Warped will be coming back this year.
But emo fans are not out of luck when it comes to music festivals! After all, We Were Young is coming back for another run this year!
Honestly, I think We Were Young, despite all its PR issues in 2022, was the nail in the coffin for Warped Tour, and the spirit of Warped will inevitably continue with WWY.
That is, if the PR issues with WWWY don’t continue to complicate things.
When WWWY was revived in 2022 (because 2022 was not the first WWWY, that was actually in 2017), the list of bands was released before all of the bands had confirmed that they would be playing. When news of this reached fans, many were rightfully upset at the event team’s handling of the situation.
Optics only got worse when the first day of the event was cancelled due to weather.
Despite all these issues, WWWY was still successful enough to come back this year, and both 2022 and 2023 have had massively popular bands like Paramore, My Chemical Romance, Green Day, and Blink-182 as headliners. This alone makes it a strong candidate for the spiritual successor for Warped Tour.
WWWY announced the 2023 iteration in October of 2022, and how the folks over at Warped decided to take this news is currently unknown. The official Warped Tour website still lists the festival as “Warped Tour, 1995-2019” but that doesn’t mean Warped won’t ever come back.
Truthfully, only time can really tell what will happen to the beloved Warped Tour, but it seems like the alternative community won’t be without a large-scale music festival for a while!