A new music festival is coming to the City of Trees in October. This time, it’s a traveling electronic dance music festival.
Breakaway Music Festival organizers announced in late May that they will make their Northern California stop in Sacramento the weekend of October 11-12. According to Visit Sacramento President CEO Mike Testa, organizers are planning to use Cal Expo as the venue.
Breakaway began in 2013 and travels around the nation putting on music festivals at different cities. Before stopping in Sacramento, the festival will travel to Minnesota, Michigan, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, North Carolina, and Alabama.
Testa said Visit Sacramento is thrilled the organizers see viability in Sacramento. He hopes the experience will be enough for Breakaway to return to the city in the future.
“I really love the growth of this market when it comes to music,” Testa said. “Aftershock was the pioneer from a festival standpoint. It grew from a one day festival to a four day festival, and one of the largest in the United States. That creates opportunity, and that creates attention from other promoters, and we've seen that come to fruition with a number of different music festivals.”
Tickets for the two-day festival are available now on their website.
Breakaway is slated to happen around the same time as the GoldenSky Country Music Festival, which was supposed to take place before it was postponed to next year.
Testa said it’s “coincidental,” but he expects GoldenSky to return in 2026.
“Losing GoldenSky for even a year economically is a loss,” he said. “So, to fill it with another music festival of this caliber is a great thing to happen this year. We're fortunate that they saw the opportunity in Sacramento.”
Testa stated that festivals are great for Sacramento because there are a lot of music fans in the area, and they also attract a ton of visitors who spend money while they’re here.
The 13th annual heavy and rock music festival Aftershock will be held the weekend before the Breakaway Music Festival.
“You look at Aftershock as the example: you've got 40,000 people a day at that venue, and 67% of them don't live in the Sacramento region, so they're staying in hotels,” he said. “They're going to our restaurants. They're spending money in our economy. So from an economic standpoint, these are tens of millions of dollars that these events are bringing to our city.”
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