Organizers for Boston Calling announced a series of changes Thursday aimed at addressing complaints that last year's three-day music festival was unsafe.
"We are back at Harvard May 23-25, 2025, and we've been working hard to elevate your experience and enhance the value of your ticket!" organizers said in a social media post Thursday morning.
They said in a subsequent post that the improvements will include lowering ticket costs, bringing back an indoor, air-conditioned arena where people can take a break from the heat, adding more water stations and merging the green and red stages into one to provide better views and more space to roam.
They also released a copy of their "new & improved" 2025 site map.
— Boston Calling (@bostoncalling) January 2, 2025
In the wake of last year's festival, people took to social media saying it felt hard to get air and it wasn't possible to move due to how thick the crowd was on the final day of the festival at the Harvard Athletic Complex.
"It felt unsafe and it was so like just congested everywhere, it was really hard to get like air, and just get like a break from the crowds," Sarah Mundy, who attended the festival, said at the time. "When people make that kind of investment, to spend their money that way, they deserve to have like a safe experience where they're not having a panic attack."
Mundy had posted a video to TikTok saying she couldn't believe how unsafe the event was. She also said it took over three hours to fill your water bottle at the refill stations and over an hour to get food.
"This event was so unorganized and so oversold that they are lucky that nobody died," she said in the video. "In every direction, there were walls and walls of people...you could not escape the crowd."
"The entire time I just kept thinking this is so unsafe. Like if there's an emergency in the thick of this crowd, there's no chance that somebody's going to be able to get to them," she added.
Another woman on TikTok said there was a "giant crowd crush" that was "pretty scary," adding that she didn't see a single security person.
"You started to get really packed in and nobody could move," Julie Turtle said. "After a few minutes of that we began to realize this really is not normal for a crowd at a concert. There were people around us in the crowd who were actively having panic attacks, people were yelling for medics..."
She also claimed Boston Calling was deleting people's negative comments on their Instagram page.
A Boston EMS spokesperson said they had nearly 800 medical encounters over the course of the three days, with 23 patients taken to local hospitals for treatment. More than half of the medical calls came on Sunday, when temperatures soared into the 90s.
Following last year's festival, Boston Calling organizers said the occupancy was several thousand below capacity. But they also vowed at the time that they would work to "improve the experience, layout, and ultimately create a better environment for everyone," adding that they never want anyone to feel unsafe at the show.
Boston.com, citing several sources, said there were at least 40,000 people who attended Sunday's sold-out set, which featured The Killers, Hozier, Megan Thee Stallion, and Chappel Roan. That's more than double the amount of people who attended the festival the day before.
This year's Boston Calling lineup has yet to be announced, but organizers have typically released that information sometime in January. Last year, they released the list of artists on Jan. 9.
