Vans Warped Tour might be one of the best-selling festivals of 2025, but organizers say no one music act is responsible for moving the bulk of the 240,000 tickets sold so far across three U.S. cities. Indeed, the brand name alone seems to have been enough.
“We sold the vast majority of those tickets before we had a lineup,” says Kevin Lyman, founder and producer of the traveling punk show, which ran from 1995 to 2018 before returning this year for a limited 30th anniversary run. Lyman, who has partnered with Live Nation festival company Insomniac for this year’s Warped, is working from a makeshift office and headquarters after the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year forced him to leave his Altadena home, which was damaged but largely spared from the blaze.
“I think there’s nostalgia in the market, but it’s not just for the music — people are longing for events that are affordable and give them a chance to discover something,” says Lyman. Prices for this year’s Warped Tour are $149 for a two-day pass, and the tour is much shorter, with just three stops this year instead of the typical 36 markets. Two of the three markets piggyback off events organized by Insomniac: Warped’s Washington, D.C. stop, from June 14-15, comes two weeks after Insomniac’s Project Glow EDM fest; while the Orlando stop, Nov. 15-16, takes place one week after EDC Orlando at Camping World Stadium. Warped Tour is also coming to Long Beach, Calif., from July 26-27 at Shoreline Waterfront Park.
Each of the three two-day stops on the tour accounts for nearly 80,000 tickets sold. When combined, the fans attending all six days of the Warped Tour this summer will have purchased 240,000 tickets. That’s likely more tickets than were sold at Coachella this year, which took place over two consecutive three-day weekends, sources tell Billboard. It also likely surpasses the number of tickets sold at the three-day Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas.
Billboard recently caught up with Lyman to discuss the 30th anniversary tour, including how he pitched it to Steven Van Doren, son of Vans founder Paul Van Doren; his expectations from the fans; and whether the 2025 outing is a one-and-done or has the potential to return in 2026 and beyond.
What made you decide to bring Warped Tour back?
People don’t miss something until it’s taken away. I had a fantastic crew; we did a lot of marketing for bands and helped a lot of younger artists. And then, when we took it away, people realized that there was a place for something like Warped Tour. But by then I was busy doing other things — traveling, teaching my class at USC and working on other projects. And then the pandemic hit, and being on a college campus and being around young people, I could see a new need for Warped Tour arise.
What kind of reception have you received so far?
I think it’s been exciting because the bands that remember Warped Tour remember how important it was to their careers, and the younger bands now are super excited to be able to have that experience and be part of it.
Why did you bring in Insomniac for this year’s Warped Tour?
There’s a lot of people over there that grew up around Warped Tour, attended in the past and even worked on Warped Tour. Maureen Valker-Barlow, who works as a senior vp at Insomniac and landed her first job at Warped Tour, approached me, and it was easy for us to figure out how to work together. And then it was like the green light came on, and we just ran with it. They have great people over there like Amanda Phelan, who is a great booker, and Maureen, who I previously mentioned, handling sponsorship, as well as Chris Barlow and Nathan Armstrong in production. I’ve always operated as very small and independent, working in a garage, and they’re a big company, and they know how to run festivals. They handle a lot of the day-to-day stuff, absorbing a significant part of the logistics. And marketing. They’ve given me a little bit more of that structure.
What was it like approaching Vans to do another tour?
That was easy, because Steve Van Doren and myself go back — we’re talking 25 years of Warped Tour and years before that. It was easy to go over there and say, “Hey, here’s the idea, let’s bring it back with these people. I have faith in them.” Sure, there was a lot of paperwork, but it only took ten minutes of conversation to get this thing going.
Was it difficult to come up with a budget around a $149 ticket price?
Not at all, because I knew from the beginning that Warped would only work if we kept the ticket price fair. I feel strongly that a $149, two-day ticket is affordable to our fans. I think 90% of the reason that people are getting turned off by festivals is because they’re too expensive. Warped was always the show for people that maybe didn’t have that money for some of the other festivals. Both myself and Insomniac felt $149 was the right price, and a lot of people have responded to that price. It also helps that we delivered the lineup. It’s an eclectic lineup that touches on our history and past, but it also looks forward to the future. I’m excited to see which of the younger bands we’ve booked get the biggest reaction from the fans.
You’ve got some big names on the lineup this year like Avril Lavigne, Fishbone, Less Than Jake, Dropkick Murphys, Pennywise and Sublime. You’ve also got dozens of baby bands and newcomers scheduled to play. How do you strike the right balance between old and new?
Well, it’s partially an economic exercise. Every band you book, no matter how big, makes up part of your ticket price, and you always have a few that are reliable and a few that are more of a gamble. We’re booking some of these bands in January, wondering how big they will be in August? Are they going to be bigger than what we paid them? Can the $5,000 band generate $25,000 in value from fans who are excited to see them? If you look at our social media right now, we really don’t need to push Sublime or Rise Against. They’re already known. People are going to enjoy them, and they’re going to have a big, big crowd. We want to grab onto those younger acts like LØLØ or Honey Revenge and really boost them on our social media so they have a big audience at Warped Tour. A lot of what we focus on is leveraging the Warped brand and the larger bands to help raise the profile of the smaller acts.
Did you get the idea to list the bands on the lineup poster in alphabetical order from Insomniac?
No, that’s something I started doing in 1996 because I hate arguing over billing. I think we waste so much time arguing over font size on the poster when we should be marketing to fans and getting behind the show. People are smart. People will come and find the bands they want to see. If you could put Korn in the bottom corner of a festival lineup, people would find them and be excited about them.
What about scheduling? How do you keep egos in check with the schedule?
We don’t announce the set times until the day of the show. I do that because I want people to come early and enjoy all the young bands. I go to too many festivals where people come in at sunset and miss all the great young bands. And my thing is, Warped fans are diehard music fans. They’re not fashion fans, they’re there for the music. And they’re going to figure out the lineup. And I think everything we’re doing so far is working. Hopefully, we deliver the show that people will want to come see next year.
So Warped is not a one-and-done? This is a multi-year project?
I want to really go see what the first show is like in D.C. before we make any final decisions on that. I want to go see the audience and who’s coming. Is it people that want to be part of something moving forward, or people trying to capture a memory? My guess is that it will be a blend of both, but we’ll see.
Could it return as a true touring property, going from city to city, buses and all?
No. Definitely not. I can’t do that to myself, hitting the road for two months straight. I’ve had seven different surgeries because of the Warped Tour. I don’t need any more.
