Brad Paisley, Dwight Yoakam, Luke Bryan and Dierks Bentley will be among the main attractions at FarmBorough, a new country music festival coming to New York City over three days in June.
The festival, planned for June 26 through 28 on Randalls Island, was announced on Wednesday by Live Nation Entertainment and the New York concert promoter Founders Entertainment, which are presenting it in partnership.
The country genre, led by a new generation of stars like Mr. Paisley, Miranda Lambert, Blake Shelton and - until her recent move to pure pop - Taylor Swift, has been surging in popularity for years; on the radio, it has supplanted Top 40 as the most popular format. But even while data have repeatedly shown that New York is a big market for country, the genre's identification with Nashville and with rural life has historically made it a tough sell in the city.
'Everybody has the big myth that New York City for some reason has not been a supportive country music market,' said Brian O'Connell, Live Nation's president for country touring, 'but it's just not true.'
Mr. O'Connell pointed to recent touring successes in New York, like sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden by Mr. Shelton, Mr. Bryan and Eric Church. Tours like those have been helped by promotion on WNSH, known as Nash FM (94.7), which in early 2013 became the first country radio station in New York in 17 years, although its ratings have been modest.
Among the other performers expected for FarmBorough are Brandy Clark, Kip Moore, Randy Houser, Ashley Monroe, Maddie & Tae, Wade Bowen and the Cadillac Three. Tickets will be sold only as three-day passes costing $225, not including fees. They go on sale next Thursday.
Founders Entertainment has had a fast rise in New York as the presenter of the Governors Ball Music Festival, which started on Governors Island in 2011 as a one-day event and has grown into a major music weekend. The festival moved to Randalls Island in 2012, and in its most recent edition, in June, featured Outkast, the Strokes, Vampire Weekend, Jack White and Skrillex.
By presenting both festivals at the same space a few weeks apart - the Governors Ball will be June 5 through 7 - the promoters will be able to save money through some logistical synergies, they said.
Festivals in and around New York have had a troubled history, with most failing after just a year or two. All Points West, for example, was presented in 2008 and 2009 at Liberty State Park in Jersey City as an East Coast version of Coachella, the hugely successful annual festival in the Southern California desert, but it drew complaints from concertgoers about transportation delays and never returned.
Jordan Wolowitz, one of the partners of Founders Entertainment, said his company had worked to overcome the New York festival curse by starting small and focusing on fundamentals, like where the event takes place. Randalls Island, which has hosted entertainment as diverse as Cirque du Soleil and the Electric Zoo dance-music festival, is easily reached by public transportation, Mr. Wolowitz said, making it perfect for New Yorkers reluctant to leave the city for entertainment.
'Location, location, location is everything in New York,' he added. 'We are suckers for convenience here, and if you have a festival in New Jersey or Long Island, it might as well be in Canada.'
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