The Wonderfront Music & Arts Festival has announced the first 47 artists for its 2025 edition, which will take place May 16-18 on seven stages alongside San Diego Bay downtown.
The eclectic lineup at Embarcadero Marina Park North will feature at least three multiple-Grammy Award-winning headliners in Anderson .Paak & The Free Radicals, guitar-slinger Gary Clark Jr. and San Diego singer-songwriter Jason Mraz and his band.
The list of confirmed performers at the multimillion dollar festival includes such diverse artists as Janelle Monae, Foster The People, Texas psych-rock trio Khruangbin, South Korean DJ Peggy Gou, rapper Freddie Gibbs, Julien Baker and the first full performance in 31 years by 4 Non Blondes, the all-woman Bay Area rock band headed by former San Diegan Linda Perry.
Offstage, the festival will offer an array of new interactive art installations, VIP amenities, and a General Admission Plus ticket option that will include luxury lounges, expedited entry and private bars and restrooms. At least 30 additional acts will be announced in the coming weeks, including for the DJ-fueled outdoor Electric Lounge, which debuted last year and will be expanded this time around. Free performances by local artists will take place on the festival’s Community Stage at Seaport Village.
“We’ll have more than 80 acts altogether and are looking at adding an eighth stage, possibly in Ruocco Park,” said Wonderfront CEO and co-founder Paul Thornton.
Early-bird tickets for the 2025 edition of Wonderfront went on sale in December and are now sold out. A pre-sale for regularly priced tickets begins at 10 a.m. Wednesday at wonderfrontfestival.com. Ticket sales for the general public begin at 10 am. Friday.
Wonderfront was bought in 2024 by Events.com, the La Jolla-based marketing and software company that was previously Wonderfront’s primary presenter. The company recently launched a live events division, Events.com Presents, and last week announced it will become the first corporate presenter in the 22-year history of San Diego’s Gator by the Bay music and food festival.
“We were one of the earliest investors in Wonderfront when it debuted in 2019,” said Events.com President and co-founder Stephen Partridge. “We saw that Paul and his team could do something really special and we absolutely wanted to be part of it. We think our partnership with Wonderfront can create a template for the live-events industry and we’re really excited to provide our technology and services.”
Auspicious and problematic.
The timing of Wonderfront’s kickoff proved both auspicious and problematic.
Its launch six years ago came two months after the 2019 edition of the KAABOO Del Mar festival. KAABOO has remained dark since then and has been the subject of multiple lawsuits. A 2024 return was announced, then shelved until this year. As was the case last year, no specific dates or performers have been announced yet for KAABOO, whose five-year run resulted in a loss of an estimated $59 million, according to a report in Billboard magazine.
Wonderfront had an impressive 57,000 attendees for its three-day debut in November 2019, but was shuttered in 2020 and 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its return in 2022 saw attendance dip to 30,000, followed by a one-year hiatus as the festival pivoted from a late November date to late May.
The 2024 edition of Wonderfront drew 42,000 people and the festival’s opening day become the first sell-out in the event’s history. The second day drew nearly as high an attendance. It was also the first time Wonderfront’s producers generally focused on a few specific music styles each day, creating a template that will again be followed this year.
“There are a lot of genres we present at the festival, and — prior to last year — we tried to stretch all of them across all three days,” Thornton said.
“Our approach hasn’t really changed. We still want to focus on new, emerging artists who people may be getting to see for the first time, and on established career artists who have new music out or have not been touring. But each day will have a theme: dance and hip-hop on Friday; rock, funk, indie, soul and pop on Saturday; and psychedelic and jam-rock on Sunday.”
As has been the case since its inception, this year’s Wonderfront will showcase an array of artists who are new to the festival and, in some cases, San Diego altogether.
They include such up-and-coming young pop-soul singers as Orion Sun, Leon Thomas, Jalen Ngonda and Daniel Caesar. The lineup will also feature Los Angeles surf-rock-meets-cumbia band La Lom, which last year performed here at SDSU as the opening act for Vampire Weekend.
“I believe San Diego can be a musical tastemaker market. That’s been a goal, and a challenge, for us since day one,” Thornton said.
“People say San Diego is just too much of a mainstream-music market. We have fought against that narrative. And last year, we finally broke through. We took on the naysayers and had our first sell out, which was really exciting for us. Now, we’ll build on that.”
2025 Wonderfront Music & Arts Festival
When: May 16-18
Where: Embarcadero Marina Park North, Seaport Village and Ruocco Park, downtown
Tickets: $165-$399 (one-day passes), $375-$899 (three-day passes). The pre-sale runs from 10 a.m. Wednesday to 10 p.m. Thursday, and requires signing up on the festival website to obtain the pre-sale code. The on-sale for the general public begins at 10 a.m. Friday.
Online: wonderfrontfestival.com
