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Waterfront Park 9 results for Waterfront Park in Concert & Music Events Clear filter

Everything at Waterfront Park — including past events

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CRSSD Festival Fall 2026 — San Diego

Sep 26, 2026 Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific Hwy,…

Bay water shimmering behind the stage, palm trees bending to the bass, and a crowd that came to move rather than to pose. Twice a year the waterfront downtown turns into the kind of dance floor most cities only dream about. The lineup is built for people who know what a b2b set actually means: Chris Lake back to back with Disclosure, Skepta crossing lanes, Helena Hauff delivering the darkest techno anyone will hear outdoors this year, and Groove Armada closing out a sunset only this park can frame. This is not a rave in a desert parking lot. Three stages, 21-and-over, walking distance from the Gaslamp. The intimacy is the product — you will remember a set here five years from now because you could actually see the DJ's hands. Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific Hwy. September 26 and 27. Wear something you can dance in for nine hours, and do not schedule anything for Monday.

Forecastle Festival 2026 — Louisville, KY

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🌎 Nation's Best

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Forecastle Festival 2026 — Louisville, KY

Jul 17 – Jul 19, 2026 Waterfront Park, 129 River Rd, Lou…

The best festival discovery of your life might be a band you'd never heard of, playing a mid-afternoon set with the Ohio River going gold behind them. That's the promise Forecastle has quietly kept for over twenty years — a Louisville festival that would rather matter than get big, built as much around genuine environmental work as around the music, which is how it draws twenty thousand people who are serious about what they came for without being precious about it. The river is the whole character of the place. The stages are set so the water is always in view, the evening light comes off it at exactly the right hour, and the breeze does what no indoor venue can to a humid July night. Across the weekend you move between indie rock, hip-hop, electronic, and sounds that don't sort neatly into anything — and Forecastle's real trick is booking artists at the hinge of their careers, right before the festival slot turns into an arena tour. If you're the kind of person who wants to say you saw them here first, this is the field to do it in. Louisville throws in the rest for free: bourbon, a genuine food city, a waterfront worth the walk. July 17–19, 2026 at Waterfront Park — about twenty minutes from the airport. Three-day passes and GA camping go first, so move early. July here is hot and honestly humid; sunscreen and a hat aren't optional, and the river breeze helps most after the sun drops. Lineup and tickets at forecastlefest.com. It's on this list because it proves a festival can stay rooted to one river, one city, one ethos for two decades and be better for never trying to be Coachella.

17th Annual Brazilian Festival — San Diego 2026

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17th Annual Brazilian Festival — San Diego 2026

Aug 29, 2026 $20-$60 Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific High…

The drumline starts and something in your chest recognizes a rhythm it has never heard before. That is not a metaphor — watch what your feet do before you decide anything. Ten hours of samba, live music, capoeira, and food that will make you resentful of everything you ate last week. Paula Lima headlines, a Latin Grammy nominee, with Negritude Junior, Vitin, and Forromeno on the bill. The carnival parade cuts straight through the crowd rather than past it, and the capoeira roda turns physics into an argument nobody wins. This is not a sampler platter of Brazilian culture with a gift shop attached. The community here has been throwing it for seventeen years for one reason: the music does not translate. You have to stand inside it. Kids' rides, cultural exhibits, and a food court that treats rice and beans like the art form they are. So come stand inside it, and bring somebody who needs loosening up.

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Into the Horizon Music Festival 2026

Jun 27 – Jun 28, 2026 Varies Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific Hwy,…

Into the Horizon brings two days of world-class electronic music to Waterfront Park along the San Diego Bay, produced by Insomniac Events — the team behind Electric Daisy Carnival and Beyond Wonderland. Headliners Martin Garrix and Tiësto anchor a lineup spanning house, techno, trance, and bass music across multiple stages. Waterfront Park sits directly on the bay in downtown San Diego, giving this festival one of the most spectacular urban festival settings in California. The stage configurations take advantage of the open waterfront, with the San Diego Bay as the backdrop for the main stage. Daytime programming runs through sunset, and the evening sets are designed around the bay lighting and skyline. Insomniac festivals are known for production quality — LED rigs, full stage decor, and the infrastructure that distinguishes a produced event from a promoter show. Food and beverage vendors are spread throughout the grounds. The venue is walkable from the downtown core, the Convention Center, and the Little Italy and Gaslamp neighborhoods. Two-day passes and single-day tickets are available. Age 18+. Rideshare drop-off on Pacific Highway. This is a marquee summer festival weekend for San Diego — whether you are a longtime EDM fan or just discovering the scene, Into the Horizon is the summer anchor event for the city.

Kinfolk Fest Juneteenth 2026 — San Diego

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Kinfolk Fest Juneteenth 2026 — San Diego

Jun 20, 2026 Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific High…

A spades table is where you find out who somebody really is. There will be one running all afternoon, loud, with a crowd three deep around it, while the DJ works from R&B into Afrobeats and the bay does that thing it does when the light drops behind the skyline. This is the day San Diego's Black community takes the waterfront for itself — live performers and DJ sets from afternoon into the night, a marketplace of Black-owned businesses, artists, and makers, art installations, and food worth planning your appetite around. Organized by SD Melanin, strictly grown folks, and built so that the celebration and the economics happen in the same place on the same day. Waterfront Park on Pacific Highway, with general admission and table service for groups who want to post up. Text it to the cousin who keeps saying nothing ever happens in this city.

Kinfolk Fest — Juneteenth San Diego 2026

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Kinfolk Fest — Juneteenth San Diego 2026

Jun 20, 2026 Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific Hwy,…

Most festivals put a headliner on a poster and build the day around whoever that is. This one puts the businesses in the center and lets the DJs run underneath the whole afternoon, which turns it into something closer to a block party where everybody happens to be selling what they make. Food, apparel, art, beauty, wellness, home goods, all of it from local and regional Black-owned vendors, with San Diego Bay sitting behind the tables. SD Melanin has been running this version of Juneteenth long enough that it now anchors the city's Black summer calendar, and the people working the booths know each other by name. Come early if you want to actually cover the market instead of skimming it. Waterfront Park, twenty-one and up, details at sdmelanin.com, and the trolley beats hunting for parking on Harbor Drive. Bring the friend who keeps saying San Diego does not have this.

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Holo Holo Music Festival 2026 -- San Diego Waterfront Park

Jul 18, 2026 Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific Hwy,…

Some people feel the pull of island culture without ever leaving the mainland -- and for one day a year, the San Diego waterfront answers it. Holo Holo, Hawaiian for going on a journey, transforms Waterfront Park into a SoCal island experience where reggae basslines mix with harbor breezes and strangers become ohana by sundown. The lineup brings the best of reggae, R&B, and Hawaiian music: Hirie, The Green, Ekolu, Natural Vibrations, High Watah, Wavvy, and Pau Hana, on a full-day bill overlooking the bay. The venue, nestled along the Embarcadero with views of Coronado Island and the San Diego skyline, is one of the most beautiful outdoor concert settings in Southern California. Gates open at noon for an all-ages crowd. Saturday, July 18, 2026. Limited parking downtown -- rideshare or trolley recommended. Tickets start around 117 dollars on AXS.

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San Diego Brew Fest — Spring Edition

May 9, 2026 From $45 Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific Hwy,…

Over 100 craft beers from San Diego's legendary brewing scene, all in one place. SD is the craft beer capital of America — breweries you've read about, discovered on tap, and ones you've never heard of. Live music, food trucks, and the feeling that you found your people.

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CRSSD Festival

Sep 28 – Sep 29, 2024 WATERFRONT PARK, SAN DIEGO

Experience the electrifying atmosphere of CRSSD Festival on September 28th and 29th, Fall '24, at Waterfront Park, San Diego. Join us for two days of exceptional live music performances featuring top artists like Disclosure, Gesaffelstein, BICEP, and more. Dive into the festival's immersive art installations, enjoy delicious food options, and dance under the California sun with fellow music enthusiasts.

While you are looking Different scene, same night out.

Neo Soul Tuesdays — The Onyx Room, Gaslamp San Diego

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Neo Soul Tuesdays — The Onyx Room, Gaslamp San Diego

Every Tuesday · Next Oct 13 The Onyx Room, 852 5th Ave, San Di…

The bass drops at nine and doesn’t stop until two in the morning. A live band sets the foundation while DJs layer in the grooves, and somewhere between the second drink and the third song you realize the whole room is moving and nobody choreographed this — it just happened because the music demanded it. Neo Soul Tuesdays at The Onyx Room is the weekly gathering for San Diego’s soul, R&B, and funk community. The crowd is 21-and-up and dressed like they meant it. The format blends live instrumentation with DJ sets and open mic poetry, which sounds like it shouldn’t work but does because the Onyx Room is the kind of basement-vibe space where genres stop being separate things and start being moods. If you have ever stood in a room where Erykah Badu was playing and felt like the whole city understood you, this is the closest you get to that feeling on a weeknight. Every Tuesday, 9:00 PM – 2:00 AM. Twenty-one and up. The Onyx Room, 852 5th Ave in the Gaslamp.

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Shiner, Fotocrime, Nonexistent Night

In 7 days · Oct 15 Casbah, 2501 Kettner Blvd, San Die…

Too heavy for the radio and too melodic for the hardcore kids was a real commercial dead end, and the bands stuck in it spent the nineties being adored by about eleven thousand people who all still bring it up unprompted at parties. The headliner came out of Kansas City and made that particular trade-off sound deliberate: enormous low end, patient song structures, vocals that stay calm while everything underneath them gets heavier. Then look at who is opening. Fotocrime plays cold, drum-machine-driven post-punk that on paper shares nothing with the band above it, and in sequence makes complete sense — the same appetite for weight and repetition, routed through a different decade and a much colder set of tools. That is the actual reason to go. Bills this well-sequenced are rare, and the odds are good you arrive for one act and order the other one's record from the parking lot afterward. Doors seven-thirty, first act eight-thirty, a Thursday. October 15, Casbah, 2501 Kettner Blvd. Bring whoever you argue about record production with. The line between heavy nineties rock and the darkwave rooms across town is far thinner here than either crowd will admit.

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Ultra Music Festival 2027 — Miami, FL

Mar 26, 2027 Bayfront Park, 301 Biscayne Blvd, …

You have heard the drop a thousand times through earbuds on a train. You have never heard it through a wall of speakers facing the open water of Biscayne Bay while thirty thousand people make the same involuntary noise at the same time. That difference — between knowing a song and feeling it rearrange your chest cavity — is why Ultra exists and why it keeps filling a downtown Miami park every March. Ultra Music Festival returns to Bayfront Park for three days in late March 2027, and the thing that separates it from every other electronic music festival on earth is the setting. The main stage faces the bay. The Miami skyline rises behind the crowd. The transition from daylight to dark happens while the music is playing, so the whole visual register shifts without anyone announcing it. The afternoon acts play to sunshine and palm trees. The headliners play to a city that looks like it was engineered as their backdrop. The lineup will drop between December and January, and it will be the usual argument-starter — legacy acts who defined entire genres performing alongside rising names who are about to, and at least one booking that makes the Reddit thread go sideways within minutes. Ultra's curatorial identity has always leaned toward "the person you will be talking about in five years," and the proof is in the alumni list. Acts who played the mid-card stage at Ultra headlined Coachella eighteen months later. The festival does not chase the moment. It creates the next one. Three stages run simultaneously, which means the real experience is the walk between them — leaving one sound world, crossing a park, and entering another entirely. The bass from the main stage bleeds into the resistance tent. The ambient stage near the water sounds like a different planet. Biscayne Bay keeps the temperature human even at midnight. The food vendors have learned that this crowd eats at 11 PM and again at 2 AM. Tier 1 general admission three-day passes started at $359 and moved fast. Tier 2 is $419. VIP three-day starts at $1,797 and includes elevated viewing decks, private bars, and air-conditioned lounges that nobody actually stays in because the point is to be outside when the drop hits. General admission is 18+. VIP areas are 21+. Payment plans available for $49 down with equal monthly installments through January 2027. March 26 through 28, 2027. Bayfront Park, downtown Miami. The drop hits different when the whole city is the subwoofer.

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Stagecoach Festival 2027 — Indio, CA

Apr 23, 2027 Empire Polo Club, 81-800 Avenue 51…

Stagecoach is the largest country music festival in the United States, held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio the weekend after Coachella wraps. The 19th edition runs April 23 through 25, 2027, on the same grounds, with the same infrastructure, for a completely different crowd — and that contrast is the most interesting thing about it. What it feels like is a desert county fair that happens to book stadium headliners. The temperature routinely hits triple digits by mid-afternoon and drops hard after dark, so the day has two distinct halves: a sunburnt, beer-in-hand, sitting-on-the-grass afternoon, and a cold, enormous, everybody-singing night. The Palomino stage is where the people who actually care about country music spend their time — it programs Americana, outlaw country, and legacy acts who have been touring for forty years, and regulars will tell you the best set of the weekend almost always happens there rather than on the main stage. There is a working honky-tonk dance floor with line dancing lessons, and the number of people who arrive skeptical and end up on it is high. Worth it? If you like country music even slightly, this is the definitive American version of the experience, and the production is genuinely enormous. If your interest in country is ironic, skip it — the crowd is sincere in a way that makes irony feel bad-mannered, and you will have a long, hot, expensive weekend feeling like a tourist. It is also, worth saying plainly, an easier festival than Coachella: older crowd, less status anxiety, more people who came to hear songs. Before you go: the heat is the entire logistical problem. Shade is limited and the campgrounds are exposed, so the veterans bring canopies and treat the middle of the day as downtime. Hydration stations are free and the lines at them are shorter than the bar lines. Boots are the standard footwear and the ground is grass and dirt, not pavement, which matters by day three. Camping sells out well before the lineup is announced, which tells you something about who attends — people book the weekend before they know who is playing. It earns its place on this list because it is the one weekend a year when the largest country audience in America gathers in the California desert, forty-five minutes from Palm Springs, on the same field that hosted an entirely different culture seven days earlier. Knowing both things happen in the same place is the whole story. April 23 through 25, 2027, at the polo grounds on Avenue 51.

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EDC Las Vegas 2027 — Las Vegas, NV

May 14, 2027 Las Vegas Motor Speedway, 7000 N L…

Electric Daisy Carnival is the largest electronic music festival in North America, held overnight at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. For 2027 it expands to two consecutive weekends under a new structure — EDC Dusk on May 14 through 16 and EDC Dawn on May 21 through 23 — with a reduced daily capacity that regulars have wanted for years. The defining fact is that it runs at night. Gates open in the evening and the grounds stay live until roughly 5:30 in the morning, which means the emotional arc of an EDC night is nothing like a daytime festival. The exhausted, euphoric hour around 4 AM, when the sky over the speedway starts going grey and the last main-stage sets are still running, is the thing people actually come back for. The kinetic sculptures, the carnival rides running all night, the enormous owl over the main stage — it is deliberately overwhelming, and the crowd participates rather than watches. Strangers trade handmade beaded bracelets, a practice that started organically and never got corporate. Worth it? Honestly, it depends on whether you can sleep during the day in Las Vegas in May. That is the real filter, and people underestimate it badly. If you can, this is one of the genuinely singular experiences in American nightlife — a scale of production that no other festival on the continent attempts. If you cannot handle heat, crowds of 100,000, or being awake until sunrise for three consecutive nights, this will be a miserable and expensive weekend. There is no partial version of EDC. What to know: the speedway is a long way from the Strip and the shuttle is the only sane option — rideshare surge at 5 AM with 100,000 people leaving at once is the classic first-timer mistake. Camp EDC exists specifically to solve the commute and sells out. Hydration is not advice, it is the entire strategy; the desert at night is cold and the daytime hotel room is hot, and people routinely misjudge both. Bring a portable battery, because cell service on the grounds is historically poor and finding your group without a phone is genuinely difficult. EDC is on this list because it is the clearest example of an event that most people will never attend but that reorganizes how they imagine a night could go. The two-weekend expansion for 2027 is the first structural change in years, and it makes attending meaningfully easier than it has been. EDC Dusk: May 14 through 16, 2027. Friday gates open at 5 PM for the opening ceremony; Saturday and Sunday gates at 7 PM, with the grounds running until 5:30 AM.

Anime Expo 2027 — Los Angeles Convention Center

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266 days away

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Anime Expo 2027 — Los Angeles Convention Center

Jul 1 – Jul 4, 2027 Los Angeles Convention Center, 120…

You will be tired in a way that feels earned. Four days, a hundred thousand people, and not one of them needs you to explain what you are talking about. The largest anime convention in North America takes the Los Angeles Convention Center over Fourth of July weekend and spills into the JW Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton beside it. Industry panels, screening rooms, autograph sessions with voice actors and composers, concerts that sell out weeks ahead. Studios from Japan use this as their main North American announcement stage — if a sequel or adaptation is being revealed, it often happens in a room you could be standing in. The exhibit hall carries imported merchandise and collaboration exclusives that surface nowhere else on the continent. Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S Figueroa St. Thursday through Sunday. Badges run from top-tier early-access down to single-day passes. Book the connected hotel corridor months out. Everyone who tells you that learned it the hard way.

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