Music Midtown
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Music Midtown is a huge music festival held in Atlanta, Georgia each year since 1994. For three days, dozens of bands play various genres of music on six stages all day and well into the night. Each stage is generally sponsored by a different local radio station.
Traditionally on the first weekend in May, the 2005 festival was moved to June 10-12. This was supposedly done for better weather, though this was counterproductive, as it put the festival into even more heat and humidity, and at a greater risk for thunderstorms with dangerous lightning. Most of the 2005 festival was rained on by remnants of Tropical Storm Arlene, repeating many of the May rains it was rescheduled to avoid. Special outdoor tiles were put down in front of the stages to protect the grass and keep it from turning to mud.
History
The festival was conceived by Atlanta-based music promoters Alex Cooley and Peter Conlon who sought to create an event similar to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and which would present the wide variety of music they both had come to enjoy during their careers in the music industry.
In 1994, the festival launched on a parcel of undeveloped land at Peachtree St. and Tenth St. in the heart of Midtown's business district. After a few years at this site, the festival was forced to move to make way for the contruction of the new Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The new festival site chosen was in downtown just north of Centennial Olympic Park and consisted mainly of closed-off streets and surface parking lots which made for a hot and somewhat unpleasant daytime concert-going experience. This led to a brief stay of two years after which the festival moved to the current 42 acre (170,000 m²) location adjacent to the Atlanta Civic Center and SciTrek.
Since finding this new home, the festival has grown dramatically and typically attacts around 300,000 attendees over the course of the weekend.
Although independent promoters when the festival was created, Cooley and Conlon sold their company, Concert/Southern Promotions, to Clear Channel Communications' subsidiary SFX Entertainment in 1998. In November 2004, Alex Cooley was released by Clear Channel Entertainment in part due to his unsuccessful assimilation into the corporate culture. His age and health problems (diabetes) prevented him from working full-time which also played a role.