Philly Music Fest returns for annual celebration of local music

Philadelphia’s premiere music festival, Philly Music Fest, is returning for its eighth annual celebration. Beginning on Monday, Oct. 21, this year’s festival will kick off with a lineup featuring 23 Philly-area bands and artists, including Amos Lee, Slaughter Beach, Dog, Devon Gilfillian, Mondo Cosmo, and many more. The musical acts will be spread across several locations in Philly, including World Cafe Live, Underground Arts, MilkBoy, Johnny Brenda’s, Solar Myth, and the Ardmore Music Hall.

Ahead of Philadelphia’s biggest music festival, Metro Philadelphia sat down with Philly Music Fest co-founder Greg Seltzer to discuss the staple in the Philly music scene that has been going strong since 2017.

Tell me a little bit about Philly Music Fest.

We’re in year eight of Philly Music Fest. It’s grown tremendously. We were at one venue, one show, in 2017. [It] was kind of a beta test. Flash forward, in year eight, we are a full week, seven nights at six different venues. So the growth has been great.

Really, it’s mission-centric, Philly Music Fest, and it’s very important. It’s structured as a nonprofit, and the missions really are pretty simple. One is to benefit and highlight local musicians, both national headliners like Amos Lee and Waxahatchee, but also emerging musicians that grow into national headliners. For example, we had Mt. Joy at our festival in 2020 and then again in 2022, and [Sept. 28], they’re playing a sold-out Madison Square Garden. So the trajectory of these emerging bands growing to headliners is a hallmark of Philly Music Fest.

But the three missions are to highlight and feature local Philly musicians, support them, and pay them well to play the festival. Host the shows at independent venues. So there are rooms that are owned by big companies around the city, and they’re great rooms, and they’re super important to the city, but Philly Music Fest is hosted only at independently owned venues to support them and make sure they’re thriving. And then the last is kind of the secret of Philly Music Fest, which is the profits from the festival are recycled into the music industry via donations to music education programs for kids.

So the hope is that we have people come out to the festival each year to see the hot new Philly bands and kind of be the national headliners. You feel like you’re at a music festival. It’s kind of got a South by Southwest sprawl to it, as opposed to a big open field. So you feel like you’re just going to some great shows, but you’re actually raising money for the next generation of Philly musicians to be on those stages.

Can you speak to the importance of reinvesting in the youth of the Philly music scene?

It’s the most important thing we do. Funding for music education in public schools has been nearly eliminated in the city of Philadelphia and even diminished quite a bit in the kind of collar suburbs. So for kids to get access to music and music education, they’re forced to find after-school programs and weekend programs, and for a lot of folks, they’re very expensive; music lessons, even online.

You go on to YouTube, the instructors are decent, but YouTube doesn’t provide you an instrument. YouTube doesn’t provide you with real-time correction and playing with a band. So these after-school programs have sprouted up, and they themselves are nonprofits, typically, and they’re super underfunded, and they are incredibly important to kind of plug the gap of the missing education in our current public curriculum. So what we’ve decided to do is all of our profits go to right now. It’s eight music education programs that are benefiting kids in Philly.

You’ve lived in the area just about your entire life. How did that inspire you with regards to Philly Music Fest?

I’ve been in or outside of Philly my entire life… so I haven’t traveled very far, but I’ve gone to a lot of shows through the last 30 years. And what kind of stood out to me is that when I travel around the country, there’s a lot of music scenes that are thriving, and they kind of work together and collaborate, typically in a music festival, and celebrate it on an annual basis.

There are countless examples around the country. But our music scene, our musicians, are deserving, and our music community of fans deserves an annual celebration of our music scene in Philadelphia. So, kind of peeling that back about ten years ago, I just was kind of curious as to why our city doesn’t have a dominant music festival. I kicked the tires on doing a larger music festival, like a Made in America or something at the Mann or the music center, but I quickly found out that the profitability of that model, unless you cut in Live Nation or ATG, is very slim.

So I rethought the music festival model and rethought the local model and figured, how about we don’t make any money, and how about we give all of the money to the musicians, the venues, and the kids, and then this kind of I guess I’ll call it a nonprofit music festival model, not very popular around the country, but it works, and it gets money in the pockets of the musicians, the venues and the kids.

There are so many different styles of music across the festival. What is the importance of that — to blend so many styles and genres into this festival?

I will tell you, it’s not an intent to blend and curate those genres. We do have a genre at Philly Music Fest. Our genre is Philly, so it’s it’s unique because we have a geographic genre as opposed to a music-style genre. So, having a geographic genre, if that even makes sense, I think we came up with it ourselves, so it makes sense to us.

If there’s hip-hop in Philly, which there clearly is, we bring that into Philly Music Fest. If there’s a thriving jazz scene, we bring that in some years. We have bluegrass when that percolates up. We always have indie rock; we have a plethora of indie rock. So we always have indie rock. We’ll have Americana/singer-songwriter, like we do this year a bit. We have R&B and soul in the Philly market, coming from the Philadelphia sound, and kind of like post-neo-soul.

So, it’s really just taking a look at all the music being made in Philly, taking a look at the bands that have been breaking out in Philly, and just trying to curate what we’re hearing at the venues and hearing in the streets from our Philly band. So that’s our genre. Our genre is actually just the music being made in our city.

Philly Music Fest returns Monday, Oct. 21, and runs through Sunday, Oct. 27. For information on shows, tickets, and more, visit phillymusicfest.com