All in Music and Arts Festival

The conventional narrative around music festivals contains a contradiction that very few people point out openly: discomfort has become part of the brand. The mud, the interminable queues for portable toilets, the oppressive heat, the remote parking lots, the camping in tents that don't repel rain — all of this gets presented as part of "the experience," as if suffering a little were the price of admission to something authentic. The All IN Music & Arts Festival was born in 2022 with a different hypothesis: that a top-tier festival can be made without attendees having to sacrifice their comfort to prove they're genuinely enjoying it.

Behind the project is a team of veterans from the live music industry with credentials that are difficult to question. Steve Sybesma and Dave Lucas are co-owners of Sunshine Promotions and Indianapolis natives, which adds a dimension of personal investment in their home city that goes beyond commercial calculation. Paul Peck arrived from Bonnaroo and co-founded Okeechobee — two festivals that in their respective moments redefined what an American festival could be. Kevin Browning, manager of Umphrey's McGee, rounded out the founding quartet. The combination of local experience and national vision was from the beginning the foundation of the project.

The venue chosen — the Indiana State Fairgrounds & Event Center on 38th Street in Indianapolis — is itself a statement of intent. It is not a grass field temporarily converted into a festival site, nor an industrial flatground with temporary infrastructure. It is one of the most complete permanent fairground facilities in the American Midwest: permanent restrooms in sufficient numbers, organised parking steps from the site, direct public transport access via IndyGo routes 4 and 39, a camping area with water, electricity, and sewer supply, and the Skyride, a permanently installed aerial attraction on the grounds that allows a bird's-eye view of the festival. "There's no site like this," said co-founder Paul Peck of the location. Comfort was not a byproduct — it was the central proposition.

The lineup of the inaugural edition, held over Labor Day weekend 2022, was notable in several respects. Daryl Hall & John Oates, Cage the Elephant, John Fogerty, and Portugal. The Man headlined a programme that also included Death Cab for Cutie, Lucinda Williams, Dawes, Trampled by Turtles, Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs, The Four Tops, and Dumpstaphunk — a mix of classic rock, Americana, indie, and soul that reflected the founding team's breadth of taste without any attempt to fit a single genre identity. Indiana artists — Julia Kahn, Doug Henthorn, J. Elliott, the Rob Dixon Trio — had space on the lineup alongside national names, with the explicit intention that the festival function as a platform for the local music scene as well as a draw for the regional audience.

The most original element of the festival was the Dreamset, inherited directly from Paul Peck's Bonnaroo legacy, where he invented the Super Jam concept. A Dreamset is a collaborative set in which musicians from different bands come together temporarily to perform the catalogue of a legendary artist or group — not as a tribute band but as an improvised gathering of musicians who respect each other and share a genuine love for the music they are playing. At the first All IN edition, the Tom Petty Dreamset brought together members of Dawes with John Oates, Matt Shultz of Cage the Elephant, and Jenny Lewis for an hour of Heartbreakers classics that those present described as one of the most memorable moments of a weekend already loaded with fine music. The Allman Brothers Dreamset was led by Duane Betts — son of co-founder Dickey Betts — and John "JoJo" Hermann, keyboardist of Widespread Panic.

The second edition, in September 2023, raised the stakes with Trey Anastasio & Classic TAB, Tenacious D, Umphrey's McGee with Jason Bonham in a Led Zeppelin Dreamset, Joe Russo's Almost Dead, Greensky Bluegrass, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, and Cory Wong — a lineup that tilted the festival clearly toward the jam band and progressive rock universe without losing the eclectic vocation that had defined it from the start. In 2024, the organisers announced a one-year pause with the promise of returning in 2025 "bigger and better," a decision that inserted the festival into a broader trend of events that found difficulties in the post-pandemic cycle of the festival industry.

The All IN Music & Arts Festival is still a young project with a short history but with an identity articulated clearly from day one: the conviction that comfort and musical ambition are not variables in tension but factors that reinforce each other, and that Indianapolis — a city better known for motorsport than for music festivals — has everything it needs to be the stage for something that genuinely matters.