Another Planet Entertainment will have another weekend of concerts the weekend after Outside Lands, as the SF Board of Supervisors approved granting a permit for the extra weekend of concerts starting August 2024.
The folks behind the annual Outside Lands music festival in Golden Gate Park, Berkeley-based concert promoter Another Planet Entertainment (APE), caught us off guard in May when they proposed an extra weekend of “headliner-driven” concert events the weekend after Outside Lands. That all sounded incredibly fun, and incredibly lucrative for APE. But the park's adjacent Richmond and Sunset officials were up in arms over dealing with a second weekend of traffic and chaos next summer — not even counting Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.
APE managed to smooth that over, largely with additional financial pledges to community groups. And after getting a key vote to move forward by an SF Board of Supervisors committee last Wednesday, the full Board of Supervisors approved granting the permit for the extra weekend of concert Tuesday in a 10-1 vote.
The legislation passed Tuesday specifically says the concerts will happen “the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday following the Outside Lands Festival in 2024, 2025 and 2026,” so it’s a three-year deal. The Outside Lands website already gives the 2024 dates of the OSL festival, saying, “See you August 9-11, 2024!”.
So that means these concerts would be on the dates of August 16, 17, or 18 in 2024. But the legislation leaves open whether these concerts would be a two-day or three-day event.
This extra weekend of shows would only be one stage and one headliner per day, as opposed to the eight stages and multiple headliners for Outside Lands. The weekend-after event would also have a much smaller footprint, as seen above, where Outside Lands is represented in orange, and the weekend-after concerts are represented in pink.
The legislation still needs to be signed by Mayor Breed, but that’s a foregone conclusion, as she is listed as a co-sponsor of the proposal.
The board approved the extra weekend of concerts with a 10-1 vote, with only Richmond District supervisor Connie Chan voting against it. “I will have to vote no on the item” as the representative of the Richmond District, Chan said before the vote, citing concerns over traffic, noise, and even the “impact on wildlife.”
But no one else opposed this measure, which otherwise had no debate and was passed with less than five minutes of discussion. The legislation also adds APE will make a “commitment” to hosting three free concerts at downtown parks in those same years of 2024-26, but there’s little detail about that, and it may be covered in other pending legislation. But for now, an extra weekend of Polo Fields concerts is on the bill to jazz up your summer next year, and hopefully pump more badly needed tourist dollars into the local economy.
Image: Annie Lesser, SFist
