With the nostalgia cycle catching up to the 90s and 2000s, the return of Warped Tour in 2025 seemed, in hindsight, to be a foregone conclusion.
The touring festival began in 1995 and traveled the country, and eventually the world, bringing some of the biggest names and undiscovered talent of the rock scene to your front door.
Warped Tour became a fixture of late 90s and 2000s alternative culture, with the festival running every summer until 2018.
When the dates and lineup for Warped Tour 2025 were announced, it was surprisingly underwhelming. It felt like every other rock festival, just with more pop-punk.
This leads to a straightforward question that should’ve come up at the start: “What is the point of Warped Tour in 2025?”
Before that can be answered, the generation of fans, including myself, needs a history lesson of what’s so important about Warped Tour in the first place.
From an outside perspective, the best thing about Warped Tour is the accessibility, both from a geographical lens and a pretty cheap ticket. The first Warped Tour in 1995 ran across 25 cities in the U.S. and Canada, while the last full Warped Tour in 2018 traveled worldwide across 38 cities.
This wide reach allowed fans to see a festival-caliber lineup in their hometown, with both massive headliners and undiscovered talent who would soon explode into the mainstream. This tour served as a proving ground for major artists such as Katy Perry (2008), Machine Gun Kelly (2012) and Green Day (2000).
30 years later, Warped Tour 2025 is lacking almost all of what made the original so enticing. Most strikingly, Warped Tour 2025 only hit three cities: Washington, D.C., Long Beach, CA and Orlando, FL.
Now that Warped Tour doesn’t travel as much, it significantly hinders the ability of small bands to reach a new, massive audience and fans outside of “festival heavy” cities aren’t given a rare hometown show.
Aside from some fresher headliners like MGK for Falling In Reverse, who remain relevant, most of Warped Tour’s big-ticket bands are mostly nostalgia acts. Festivals like the When We Were Young show that lean on nostalgia to sell tickets to an older audience that can afford them is a good business strategy, but that’s not the ethos of Warped Tour. In 2025, it has become too self-referential, making the welcoming of new fans challenging.
Without this outreach and middling lineup, Warped Tour has become just another rock festival, and when going band for band with their competition in the U.S. market, they come up incredibly short.
Rock festivals in the same states, such as Welcome to Rockville and Aftershock and others across the country (Riot Fest, When We Were Young, etc.), all have lineups that are leagues above Warped Tour.
Not only do these festivals feature bigger names, they also highlight similar small acts and have some of the biggest artists that Warped Tour is leaning on. The only major artist that jumps out as a unique festival set is MGK.
On a simple financial one-to-one, Warped Tour doesn’t win either. Warped Tour Orlando is $250 for a two-day pass, a similar price to its competitors Aftershock and Riot Fest. This cost puts an additional barrier to entry, on top of the travel, for fans wanting to engage with the scene for the first time without providing an advantage over the competition.
For the young bands, touring is not nearly as effective for a promotion method as it was in the 2000s. That’s not to say bands don’t tour; they do, but with this difficult landscape and Warped Tour’s nostalgia-based marketing, the festival isn’t uniquely valuable to these bands as it used to be.
While sales showed Warped Tour 2025 was a success, once the novelty of its return is gone, the tour is going to start facing serious problems unless it can more accurately return to its niche in the music industry.
Nicholas is a senior studying journalism at Ohio University. Please note the opinions expressed in this column do not represent those of The Post. Want to talk to Nicholas about his column? Email him at nk696121@ohio.edu.
