Imagine Festival‘s founders say inflation and rising costs forced them to cancel the highly anticipated 2024 event, while also hinting at future editions being smaller in scale.
Glenn and Maddy Goodhand, the husband-wife duo who founded Imagine, were blunt in their assessment of the festival’s challenges. “Prices kept going up and never went down“, Maddy revealed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Our costs went up 50% from before COVID but we couldn’t justify raising our ticket prices by that amount“.
The Goodhands say increasing expenses associated with staging the ten-year-old EDM party made it difficult for them to break even. “With the infrastructure we have to create and the 24/7 security, the costs have become astronomical“, she said.
Debuting in 2014 as a 2-day event in Atlanta, Imagine moved thirty miles south to Atlanta Motor Speedway and became a camping festival two years later. After a pandemic pause, it relocated to Chattahoochee Hills, but faced an abrupt cancellation due to unfavorable weather conditions. In 2022, it found a new home at Kingston Downs in Rome, Georgia.
The return of Imagine Festival to Kingston Downs is in doubt, the Goodhands say. If the festival takes place in 2025, it may return to Atlanta and be significantly smaller.
