Faster Horses Country Music Festival Canceled for 2025

Faster Horses, the country music festival held at Michigan International Speedway since 2013, will not return this summer. A message on the festival’s website announced what it described as a “pause” for 2025.

“Dear fans,” the letter read, “we have made the decision to pause Faster Horses Festival in 2025. We are taking the year to make plans for a bigger and better Faster Horses for our fans who deserve the absolute best.”

Faster Horses, operated by Live Nation, was one of the live music company’s tentpole country fests, alongside April’s Tortuga Music Festival in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and August’s Watershed Music Festival at the Gorge in Washington state. Both of those festivals are slated to proceed as planned.

Of the three, Faster Horses had a reputation for being the most rowdy, especially in the on-site camping areas, where fans created weekend communities centered around partying. In 2023, Rolling Stone wrote an investigate feature about the 2021 festival, where four fans died, including three young men who were poisoned by carbon monoxide in their camper trailer.

Investigators found that the camper’s generator had been installed in the wrong direction outside the trailer, blowing exhaust back into the cabin where the men were sleeping. Two other people were also in the trailer, but they survived. The families of the victims accused Live Nation and the Michigan International Speedway of creating unsafe camping conditions. Last October, a Michigan appeals court upheld a decision finding Live Nation not liable for the deaths.

The festival’s statement failed to definitively say that the festival would return next year. “We love our friends at Michigan International Speedway, the community, and all of those behind the scenes,” it read. “While we hope to bring you something in the future, for now we encourage you to keep the community strong and support live music in Michigan!”

The 2024 Faster Horses festival was headlined by Jelly Roll, Lainey Wilson, and Hardy.