A month before the return of the big event, the founders of the Maha Music Festival debated its future over drinks in the private-ish front room of Pageturners Lounge in Omaha’s Dundee neighborhood.

“We want this year to be successful,” said Tre Brashear while balancing a cocktail on a second-hand sofa’s armrest. “We want Maha to be reborn. But I do worry if just conceptually, the small, nonprofit local festival model doesn’t work as a ticketed event.”

Fellow founders Mike App and Tyler Owen shared the concern. In their daily lives, all three are successful businessmen.

This evening, however, they’re just three old friends and longtime music fans hashing out the details of a festival they created with absent fourth founder Mike Toohey.

“Here’s a title for your article,” Owen said, leaning back in an armchair with a glass of white wine. “No music festival ever makes money, and if you understand that, you’d understand why we do it.”

“It’s a labor of love and a service to the community,” Brashear added. “It’s fun and fulfilling and you make lifelong friends, but you don’t do it because the economic model is throwing you millions of dollars.”

Founded in 2009, Maha had become one of the Midwest’s most recognized indie music festivals, catering to fans of the genre for which Omaha was once a global hotbed thanks to local label Saddle Creek Records and its stable of nationally touring artists that included Bright Eyes, The Faint, Cursive and Rilo Kiley.

Maha grew out of the Saddle Creek era when the founders, frustrated by having to travel to see their favorite indie bands perform, dreamed up the festival as a way to bring them to Omaha.

Flooding forced Maha from its initial home on the riverfront in 2011. Presidential politics fueled a falling out with one of the founders, who created a rival festival. Then Maha organizers, faced with financial peril, called off the festival in 2024. Though the hiatus was framed as temporary, the decision led some to wonder: Was Omaha’s indie festival dead?

To The Brink

Like a phoenix, Maha is rising out of the financial ashes of its 2023 festival that nearly bankrupted the nonprofit that supports it.

Ironically, the 2023 festival boasted one of Maha’s strongest lineups. Headlined by nationally beloved indie superstars Big Thief, the 19-band lineup drew more than 12,000 fans over two days.

So what went wrong? Lots of things, says T.J. Twit, president of Maha’s board of directors and interim executive director. Twit, who works as an executive at a commercial real estate firm by day, described a perfect storm of events that hammered the festival, beginning with a literal storm that evacuated the park for 90 minutes on its first day.

“But here’s the bottom line,” Twit said. “We overspent on talent, didn’t sell enough tickets and didn’t sell enough booze. Day-of-show sales of alcohol and food are super critical, and we couldn’t sell food in the park that year.”

The Aksarben Association, made up of businesses surrounding Stinson Park, the festival’s home since 2011, had put their foot down in hopes of forcing festivalgoers to dine in local restaurants, Twit said.

Despite nearly running out of money, plans continued to move the festival to downtown Omaha and the newly renovated Heartland of America Park in 2024, even after Maha executive directors Rachel Grace and Emily Cox left the organization.

But after one of the festival’s primary sponsors pulled funding, the board voted to pause Maha for 2024.

“It got to be February and we didn’t have the money raised,” Twit said about the decision. “We also hadn’t booked a band yet. It was a combination of being behind the eight ball relative to the availability of bands, being able to book bands, and then being able to actually afford to put on the event in the new venue.”

Outlandia Rises – And Falls

Meanwhile, Maha’s biggest competition — the Outlandia Festival — was getting ready to announce its 2024 festival lineup.

At the time entering its third year of operations, Outlandia’s origins had direct ties to Maha. All but Brashear had “retired” from the Maha board years earlier, handing over the festival’s reins to a new generation of fans, but staying involved as “Maha Founders,” as they were listed on the festival’s website.

Then in 2020, Owen sponsored a local appearance by then-Vice President Mike Pence. Social media buzzed that a Maha founder was a Pence supporter. Members of the Maha Festival board, concerned with the optics and how it would be perceived by their progressive fan base, removed Owen’s name from the founders list on the Maha website, Brashear said.

“I think the (Maha) staff saw the situation as polarizing,” he said. “There was some online commentary about Maha being affiliated with that. And so they took Tyler off the website, which achieved nothing. It didn’t tamp down the controversy and it alienated a key member.”

So much so that Owen decided to start a new festival that would compete head to head with Maha. Called Outlandia, the festival would be held at the massive Falconwood Park campground in Bellevue. Instead of raising money through sponsors and donors, Owen approached investors for this “for-profit” venture.

“He basically went to his friends who were upset with how things had unfolded and they willingly parted with checks,” App said. “As such, we had 31 investors, including the Maha founders. My role was business manager.”

In addition, Owen brought on 1% Productions — Marc Leibowitz and Jim Johnson — to handle Outlandia’s production and talent booking. The Omaha-based production company had its own bone to pick with the Maha organization when its services were jettisoned in September 2020 after having booked the festival since its second year.

The lineup for Outlandia’s 2022 inaugural two-day festival featured two of the country’s biggest indie acts, Wilco and The National.

The following year was nearly as big. Among the 12 bands booked were headliners Lord Huron and Modest Mouse. And Outlandia added a camping option — something always talked about for Maha but never possible.

While Outlandia’s first two years seemed artistically successful, they never made a profit. Owen knew that would have to change in 2024. Psych-rock giants The Flaming Lips was on top of the Friday night bill, while The Head and the Heart and The Revivalists were slated to headline Saturday night.

“About a week before the 2024 Outlandia festival, Tyler and I got together for a drink,” Twit said. “He said, ‘If we don’t sell 1,500 tickets in the next five days, we’re not going to do this again next year.’ I said, ‘What would you think about rejoining forces and getting the founders back in the Maha tent?’”

Twit told Owen that Maha had one year left on their riverfront contract, but he would attempt to pull it off only if the founders were back in.

Outlandia ticket sales missed their goal. On its closing night, Owen and Twit met again and talked about bringing the Maha founders back, along with 1%.

The Founders Return

“There were two reasons why I got involved (in Maha) again,” Owen said. “One was because we worked our asses off to get Maha started in the first place.”

The other reason, Owen said:  The time he and former Maha Executive Director Lauren Martin invested in helping the city redesign Heartland of America Park to support a festival like Maha.

“Also, I’ve got a Maha tattoo on my leg,” Owen said. “I’m not going to not do it because of some personal grievance that happened yesterday.”

Twit and Owen immediately began looking for money. A number of sponsors who had pulled their support returned after discovering the founders were once again involved.

Owen said four local foundations “who shall remain nameless” wanted to help revive the event. So did a number of other local organizations and businesses, including Buildertrend, the Douglas County Visitors Improvement Fund, Creighton University, Kiewit, Millwork Commons, Midwest Housing and Google.

Sponsorships are close to double what they were in 2023, Twit said. The festival cost “just a tick over a million dollars” to put on. About two thirds of those costs are covered by sponsorships and donations, while a third comes from ticket sales and day-of-show (booze and food) sales.

To help manage costs, Maha scaled back the festival to a one-day event with one stage. They also didn’t replace their salaried executive directors, whose responsibilities included managing Maha’s volunteer army of around 500, resulting in one of the Maha board’s most controversial decisions: eliminating volunteers and handing over day-of-show festival management to 1% Productions.

A Festival Reimagined

With this year’s lineup, the festival is an easy sell for any serious indie music fan. The Maha team had already booked its headliner — seminal ’80s icons Pixies — before announcing that the festival would return Aug. 2, 2025, at Heartland of America Park, with the help of Maha’s four original founders.

Also on the 2025 Maha Festival bill are indie folk giants Waxahatchee, synth-pop duo Magdalena Bay and Outlandia fest veterans Band of Horses and Silversun Pickups. Local indie legends Little Brazil, who played at the first Maha festival in 2009, will kick off the day’s event.

Twit said he and Owen were “looking for a band that would bring this thing back and maximize ticket sales. Pixies was on top of both our lists.”

Leibowitz presented the duo with the remaining performer suggestions. Some have criticized the lineup as being more like an Outlandia Festival compared to Maha’s more progressive, inclusive and younger lineups from years past that often presented relatively obscure acts — some of whom, like Car Seat Headrest and Alvvays, emerged as headliners years later.

“Being a stage for a new band that’s maybe not as well known is a great mission,” Twit said, “but we also have to keep this thing financially viable. And so we want to book a lineup that people are excited about, will buy tickets to see and will stay for the whole thing. We need people to buy beer, T-shirts and food when they’re there.”

The founders brush off any notion that Maha is just an Outlandia Festival in disguise. “Outlandia is gone,” Owen said. “The only relationship Maha has with Outlandia is the fact that the four of us were involved in both, along with 1%.”

“And we learned a lot when we did them,” App said. “We took literally the worst of everything we’ve learned and jettisoned it, and the best of everything we’ve learned and tried to apply it to what we’re going to do.”

“Which makes us believe that Maha can be sustainable assuming, in fact, that the festival model is sustainable in this market at all,” Brashear added.

In the founders’ minds, the jury is still out.

Twit said funding is in place, and they’ve already picked a date for next year’s festival, though they still need to renew their contract with MECA to use the park.

Nothing is certain until the final numbers are in. The festival quickly sold out its allotment of 500 VIP tickets. Twit said he’d be happy if the festival sold between 5,000 and 6,000 total tickets, though far more people than that will be in the park Aug. 2 thanks to tickets provided to sponsors and other supporters.

The founders currently define success as just pulling off the show in the new location and hopefully breaking even. And for people to show up.

“The city has to prove that it actually cares,” Brashear said. “The community has a chance to say, ‘Yeah, we want Maha to continue to exist.’ I want this festival to be in this town, but if we spend a million dollars and only 4,000 people are there, how much are we spending per attendee? Is that time and money well spent?”

“A new title for the article: ‘We can sustain the losses dot-dot-dot for a while,'” Owen said.

Twit said the overwhelming sponsorship support is evidence the city values the festival.

“It’s really important for companies who are trying to recruit people to come to Omaha —  and for Omaha to retain this vibrancy — to have a successful music festival, locally owned and managed as a nonprofit,” he said. “Maha has become part of the cultural landscape of Omaha.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/the-rise-fall-and-return-of-maha/