Will your soul blossom at Sol Blume this year? No one knows.
It’s been a whole year since Sacramento’s independent hip-hop and R&B festival, Sol Blume, announced they’ll be postponing the festival until August 15-17, 2025, due to significant site damage and safety concerns at Discovery Park.
The festival was slated to take place from May 3 to 5, 2024, and was the second consecutive year it had to be canceled due to unsafe conditions from flooding at Discovery Park. In 2023, the festival was rescheduled from April to August.
The 2024 lineup featured artist SZA, Snoh Aalegra, and the duo of Aminé and Kaytranada (Kaytraminé) as headliners for the three day festival.
Since announcing the postponement a year ago, there has been no significant update on whether the festival will return this year.
The last update was in November of last year, during a City Council meeting that approved three proposals aimed at boosting tourism. One of the proposals allocated $2 million to Visit Sacramento, the city’s tourism bureau, to attract more festivals to the City of Trees.
Sol Blume’s director, Chaez Boswell, spoke at the meeting and told city officials the festival will return in 2025.
“We are excited to work alongside you all to bring Sol Blume back in 2025 and together we can ensure that Sacramento remains a vibrant hub of culture, equity and opportunity,” he said.
CapRadio has reached out to Boswell numerous times for a comment and hasn’t received a response.
As of now, the Sol Blume website doesn’t show anything and simply states 'coming soon,' after months of being inaccessible. The festival's emails are also not being delivered and are being returned as undelivered.
With no new update in 2025, many festivalgoers on social media have expressed confusion about what’s happening and are seeking answers, while others are reaching out to their banks to try to get their money back.
Sol Blume customers are not happy
Last year, the festival organizers announced that all ticket purchasers would be automatically registered to attend in 2025. Those who no longer wished to attend would be eligible for a refund between April 22 and May 17, 2024.
Sol Blume’s last Instagram post announced the festival's postponement, and in the comments, many people have expressed their feelings about the situation.
Some comments indicate that many people never received an email that would have allowed them to obtain a refund. One Redditor mentioned a few months back that they ultimately filed a complaint with their bank to get their money back.
Jakara Rogers, a Sacramento native, purchased tickets for Sol Blume last year, stating that she paid just under $400 for her ticket.
Rogers said she saw on Instagram that the festival would allow everyone to get their tickets refunded and that the information would be communicated via email.
“I never received an email at all,” Rogers said. “When I had messaged them personally about it on their Instagram DM’s, I didn't get any response. So then I went to their Instagram comments on the photos and there was still no response either.”
Festivalgoers are to receive automatic ticket upgrades since Sol Blume was postponed until 2025, according to the festival's last Instagram post.
Rogers said that as time passed, she had forgotten about the tickets until one of her friends, who had received an email, asked her if she had gotten her refund. She told her friend she hadn’t received the email, but figured it wasn’t that upsetting since her ticket would be upgraded to VIP this year.
“I realized that so many months have passed and there's no updates at all, and they haven't released the new lineup for 2025 and I started to feel that maybe it wasn't going to happen,” Rogers said. “So I went to my bank to try and file a dispute, because again, when I kept messaging them about it and posting about it in their comment sections, there weren't any responses, and other commenters were saying that the only thing that they were able to do was dispute it with their banks.”
Unfortunately, because of the time that had passed from the date of purchase, Rogers said her bank told her it was past the dispute deadline, and she would only be able to get her money back through Sol Blume.
“So now it's a year later at this point, still no money, still no updates or words about what's happening,” Rogers said. “I just really want my money back, and I don't know what else to do. I don't see any other avenues other than someone eventually filing a class-action lawsuit. I just don't know what method of recourse we have in this kind of situation.”
What about tickets?
Sol Blume introduced a partnership with Lyte, a ticket reservation system, last year, which allows festival goers to buy tickets through a layaway plan.
In September 2024, Lyte shut down its website unexpectedly, laid off hundreds of staff, and the founder and chief executive left the company without warning, leaving companies that had partnered with Lyte unpaid for thousands of dollars.
Rogers said that if the festival were to announce it will be returning this year, she would not want to attend.
“I just started to recognize that there's too many red flags. I no longer have trust in the organization,” Rogers said. “It would have to be somebody completely new and probably a completely different festival for me to feel safe investing my money into it, but this has been a very discouraging experience and very predatory at that.”
CapRadio has reached out to the official Sol Blume email for an update and the message keeps bouncing back.
According to Rogers, a part of her feels that the Sol Blume festival last year was a “money grab” because they tried to hold it at the same time of year, despite having to postpone it the previous year.
“You guys tried to have it in 2023 after all the flooding was happening,” she said. “You knew that area was not stable to use at that time of the year. So, why would you intentionally try to put it in the exact same spot at the exact same time of year when you knew the grounds wouldn't be safe to build stages on?”
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