ACL 2009 Schedule Change!

For those of you that are thinking about purchasing ACL 1-day tickets, make sure you are constantly looking at the band lineup/schedule page (the schedule isn't out yet, but they list what bands are playing on each day) before you purchase anything, because C3 seems to be switching artists around without notice. So far, the only switch that I am concerned with is the John Legend/Mos Def switch.

In my previous post, I listed the original lineup of artists playing ACL each day, and personally I prefer it much more than the current list.

Here are the changes:

Old Friday lineup:
Beastie Boys
Kings of Leon
Thievery Corporation
Mos Def

New Friday lineup:
Beastie Boys
Kings of Leon
Thievery Corporation
John Legend

Old Saturday lineup:
Dave Matthews Band
John Legend
The Levon Helm Band
Ghostland Observatory

New Saturday lineup:
Dave Matthews Band
The Levon Helm Band
Ghostland Observatory
Mos Def

While this doesn't seem like that big of a change; what they have done is loaded Friday with an extra "big" artist (John Legend), and taken him away from Saturday. This leaves Friday's lineup overcrowded and Saturday's lineup completely weak.

To me, the older lineup was a simple choice of which bands to see each night (Kings vs Beastie and Thievery vs Mos Def on Friday and DMB vs John Legend on Saturday). Now it seems like there will be more conflicts in the schedule (or at least my schedule) having to choose between Thievery and John Legend (John Legend wins) on Friday night, and then not giving a shit about DMB vs Levon Helm Band.

In my opinion, they need to move either one of the top four bands from Friday night to Saturday night (hopefully either Beastie Boys or Thievery corportation), or they need to take a really good mid-tier band from Sunday's lineup (Dead Weather, Arctic Monkeys or Toadies) to make up for the extremely weak top portion of Saturday's schedule.

I normally expect ACL to have horrible scheduling problems, but I do not, however, expect them to get it right the first time and then change it so it creates problems that didn't originally exist.