Day In Day Out music festival canceled for 2025

Amid the annual spring wave of festival and summer concert announcements, one of Seattle’s core music festivals, Day In Day Out, remained noticeably silent. On Wednesday, we learned why.

Organizers Daydream State announced that the weekend-long event would not return for its fifth year this summer, pulling the plug after last year’s attendance slipped from 2023.

“We want to thank our community of music lovers who made DIDO such a great experience over the last 4 years,” organizers wrote in an announcement. “We’re taking 2025 off to regroup and refocus our efforts to other endeavors as we reimagine the fest and site to come back even better in the future.”

Held annually at Seattle Center outside of Fisher Pavilion, Day In Day Out launched in 2021 as live events were returning after the pandemic.

After initially holding down the Labor Day weekend slot while Bumbershoot was on hiatus, DIDO moved to other summer weekends and evolved into a grassier, laid-back alternative to Capitol Hill Block Party, its sibling festival that’s also led by Daydream State. As Block Party continued drawing younger audiences with alternative pop and electronic artists, DIDO kept veteran and up-and-coming indie rockers like Bon Iver, the National, and Amyl and the Sniffers more prominently in the mix.

After daily attendance peaked at 8,000 in 2023, Daydream State expanded the festival from two days to three last year, though crowds only averaged around 5,000 per day, organizers said.

Since DIDO’s inaugural year, when it filled a festival void as event organizers slowly regrouped from the pandemic, competition for local music fans’ festival dollars increased once Seattle Theatre Group’s THING festival returned in 2022 and a rebooted Bumbershoot reclaimed its Seattle Center throne a year later. While each has its own vibe and identity, the lineups catered to largely the same indie-centric audience. This year, THING is trying a new format, hosting four single-day events the first four Saturdays in August instead of three consecutive days over one weekend.

For Daydream State, Day In Day Out’s hiatus is the second scale-back of the summer, following news that Capitol Hill Block Party is slimming from three days down to two.