[LEGIT OR NOT] Does Texas have a new Country Music Festival?
A new country music festival is in town… or is it? I recently received a submission for an event titled “Grapevine Music & Arts Festivals.” The listing referenced two different event dates and locations, all in one listing (which is a no-no for our submission process). Ever diligent in this age of event scams, I started my routine event research to see what might be going on. Something felt oddly familiar and unsettling, which always means it is time to pause and dig deeper.
RED FLAG ON THE FIELD
First stop: a search on Facebook. I was able to find the events on social media, but their names seemed to keep changing. Even just these two events seemed to have half a dozen names between “Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals” social media and website. Here are a few:
- Southlake-Grapevine Music & Arts Festival
- Coppell Music Festival
- Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals
- Texas Country, Folk & Red Dirt Festivals
- Dallas Country, Folk & Red Dirt Festival at The Sound at Cypress Waters
If you follow DFW Craft Shows, you know I am always on the lookout for red flags when it comes to new events. Unfortunately, social media, Facebook especially, is teeming with event scams. It seems there are a lot folks out there looking to make a quick buck by advertising imaginary events or (fraudulently) posing as event coordinators for legit events. An event with half a dozen names is not only poor marketing, it’s a red flag signaling you to slow down and look closer. After all, what kind of legit business benefits from confusing potential consumers?
If you want help identifying event scam red flags in general, we’ve got a full guide on how to identify event scams and avoid fraud,” with tons of tips and advice to help you do just that. Today we are going to jump in and have a look at this particular event together. I hope it will both help you come to an educated decision regarding these events as well as help you hone your event research skills.
TEXAS FEST VIBES
When I visited the website for the “Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals” events, I got a uneasy sense of déjà vu. Why did this website look so familiar? And then I realized: It reminded me of an event back in 2022 called “TexasFest,” put on by The Outlaw / OutlawNation(dot)com.
TexasFest was notoriously known for canceling events last minute, frequently without notice to the vendors. Vendors were rescheduled for future events, only to have those events canceled as well. Some lucky folks received refunds for their booth fees, but many reported that they were never able to get their money back. All vendors were upset to have invested the resources: time, money, and effort, only to be canceled last minute and/or show up only to find no event at all.
If this doesn’t sound familiar or you are newer to events here in Texas, feel free to take a moment and do some research of your own. Grab some popcorn and get ready to journey down an ever shifting rabbit hole of subterfuge and extremely bizarre behavior.
INVESTIGATION
Circling back to the Facebook page for “Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals,” I could not help but notice they had a number of different domains for their events, all the same cities in Texas where TexasFest had posted events. None of these domains were actually branded and all seemed generic:
I also noticed that the Facebook page for “Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals” had a substantial number of followers. How does that happen with such a new series of events, especially when their oldest past event only dated as far back as 2023? Also why are there ZERO comments on nearly every post “Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals” has made? That’s pretty unusual for a social media page with 43K followers.
That’s when I noticed that the page had been created in 2013. Hmm. I decided to test out a hunch.
I remembered that TexasFest was run by The Outlaw / Outlawnation(dot)com, so I pulled up their website. There wasn’t much there other than mentioning that they started in 2013. That’s okay, I was mostly just here to click the link to their Facebook page, which–surprise–loaded up the Facebook page for Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festival. The page has been renamed, but it is still the same account from, you guessed it, 2013.
Searching the posts on “Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festival” Facebook Page for the words “outlaw” resulted in many, many posts with the same logo and promos from the same “parent” company, The Outlaw / Outlawnation(dot)com, all on the same social media feed for these new events. I included the “TexasFest” logo above to illustrate a direct comparison to the extremely similar logo for The Outlaw / Outlawnation(dot)com.
LEGIT OR NOT?
Are the Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals legit? I’ll let you be the judge, but I wanted to put what I found to be compelling evidence in front of you first.
- The Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals seem to go by a variety of names, email addresses, and domains across even their own marketing platforms. All of them are fairly generic, as is event information/details.
- Both the Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals and TexasFest are linked to The Outlaw / Outlawnation(dot)com.
- Searching on the Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals brings up a variety of posts about/from The Outlaw dating back to 2013. Clicking the facebook link on The Outlaw leads you to the facebook page for Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals and TexasFest.
- TexasFest caused a lot of drama and heartache for many vendors and shoppers in 2022 and 2023.
- The names and URLs for The Outlaw social media pages were once rebranded to TexasFest and have now been renamed to Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals.
- All posts mentioning TexasFest have been removed. It seems care is being taken to not associate the two event series with each other. There are little to no comments on any of the more recent posts, despite having a large following on social media.
CONCLUSION
I am putting this information out for vendors and shoppers to review before making a decision regarding this event. Because both events ARE tied to the historical data for the same organization, The Outlaw / OutlawNation(dot)com, I would approach this event with the utmost caution. As with every event, extensive research should be performed before money exchanges hands.
DFW Craft Shows will not be promoting these events or any future events associated with The Outlaw / OutlawNation(dot)com, Texas Fest, or Country, Blues & Red Dirt Music Festivals. I’ll not be holding my breath, but I wouldn’t mind being pleasantly surprised when the event date rolls around.
I hope this post, along with our Guide to Avoiding Event Scams, helps you hone your research skills and leads you toward legit and enjoyable events for your future enjoyment.
Originally posted on September 20, 2024.
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5 thoughts on “[LEGIT OR NOT] Does Texas have a new Country Music Festival?”
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Hi, I'm Tania!
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Red Dirt Red Flag
I bought tickets in advance for a festival in Clear Lake. They stated they would be $7 online and $20 at the gate. Easy enough I’ll buy online. When I went online they were $5 each. A little weird but whatever. We go to the festival and it’s now free to get in. Hmmm
The vendors were set up on each side of the entrance road, so we literally drove through the crowd to park. The police that were there were not paid the agreed price so they didn’t direct traffic. There was talent there to sing and entertain, but no where near what was advertised. They use stock photos for each festival that are no where near what we got. I inquired what was done with our entrant fee since it was free to get in. They told us they donated it to charity. When I inquired what charity, they wouldn’t respond. They said they advertised the ticket purchase on a honor system whatever that means. Something is fishy with this group in my opinion.
I attended this Texas Fest thing a couple years ago when it was held in one of the northern DFW suburbs (Plano, Frisco, McKinney, Allen etc). It was an absolute hot mess of garbage. To be fair, there was an event – but it was extremely unorganized and not something that should have been permitted.
I spoke to several vendors and they were all pretty disappointed with the turnout – which was easily under 1,000 people. A few of the vendors had driven in from other states because it was promised to them to be a massive event with 5,000+ people per day. There were bands there and they played to a crowd of about 30 people.
There’s a reason why they tried to change their name.
I had seen this new group of festivals advertised and knew something was up.
Add them to the list of horrible promoters alongside Cullen Wood (NTX Vintage Markets) and his wife Taylor Pendleton (Happily Ever Crafty).
Thank you so much for the article! I got suspicious because the name change. . . it used to be “blues and red dirt” and now blues is taken out and it’s “folk and red dirt”
I thought exactly what you did when I first saw this. I don’t want to speak ill of this organizer if they are indeed not the same as Outlaw Nation, but I would also suggest caution.
I dealt directly with Outlaw Nation when they/he (wish I could remember his name) came to the organization I used to work for, asking that we pay his venue rental fee ($5,000) in exchange for naming the festival after our suburb. Otherwise, he’d call the “Dallas *whatever the event was called.*” (I can’t recall because he changed the name/theme each year he tried it in several venues around my suburb.) Looking at the website back then, he was promising all kinds of music groups (lots of red dirt ones), a huge mix of vendor booths, etc. Basically put everything on the website he was shooting for then removing things when they didn’t pan out. I sat with a friend involved with my organization who has music connections across Texas as he called about five of the people advertised as being at the local festival. All of them, without exception, said they were NOT booked for the festival because he was so shady, they were not about to deal with him. That first year, he promised us 10,000 people per day of the two or three day festival…seriously? I looked at photos on the Facebook page from one of his other festivals and pictures were creatively taken very close to the stage where you could only see two or three people in them. No nice big crowd shots like you usually see at festivals. Tickets were starting at $10 or so per day then, but they never seemed to make, or if they did, only a handful of people turned out. Then about two years ago, he quietly went away. I swear though, I seem to recall that the last time he was trying to do the festival, he was using a logo very similar to what it is now… which looks like the original Woodstock logo.
The fact there are so many promised in so many nearby cities makes me think this must be the same guy. Back in the day, he would schedule multiple festivals, hoping at least a couple would actually happen. Proceed with caution!!!!!
I signed up as a vendor for October and the moved it to November and ask if we want to be part, we said yes, then they cancel it again and moving it to April, due some land ownership- “they said” our April is booked out already and so we email for refund because it falls out of their rain out policy, so we received an email saying send them an invoice back so we can get ta refund back, I think it was of for us to send an invoice, maybe I said, they are just using their personal account, so I send a payment link, then an email came back, they are not refunding because it’s under the policy rainout date change. I clearly read, it’s not because of rain, so I explain again, they came back strong, no refunds. So I email again and explaining. First the email reply is so short that sometimes it made me think, they don’t read the whole email. So I explained again. They gotten back just now, no refund because of the policy that I should read the policy. And we did read what they put out there, we can’t see any policy than that.
16 years ago we got scammed by a fake UCIS website for 1300 for an application form. We took it seriously and put them in one of the news paper article, and got our money back and made people aware.
This time we are gathering more information whether if it’s just a bad business or it’s a scam. But we can’t tolerate these kind of practices. Vendors are just working to build their dreams and sometimes just to live.