The Sleepy Hollow Music Festival is coming back for an encore.
The inaugural event this past summer, which welcomed some 3,500 concertgoers to Kingsland Point Park, returns June 7, 2025, announced Liz Goodyear, co-founder of event producer River Towns Music Group.
The Village of Sleepy Hollow, the festival’s sponsor, approved $360,000 in funding for next year’s event at the Board of Trustees’ Sept. 10 meeting. That’s $40,000 less than this year, when the village received a $125,000 state grant.
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The board also approved hiring River Towns to produce the event, as well as bringing back consultant Soups On Entertainment and Audio Spectrum to handle stage sound and lighting.
“To us, it is the perfect partnership,” Goodyear said. “We’re so incredibly lucky to have the village of Sleepy Hollow embrace us and our skill sets and let us take the reins and bring them the festival that they envisioned.”
She added: “They wanted us to build an annual family-friendly music festival that brought real talent to the Hudson Valley and Sleepy Hollow. I think we delivered on that, and the trust has been strengthened in both parties. We’re looking forward to Year Two and hopefully many more years to come.”
Village Manager Anthony Giaccio said Sleepy Hollow “couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. The weather was beautiful, the event was great. Everybody I spoke to about the event thought it was great.”
Giaccio, whose band, The Assortments, performed at the festival, praised the producers.
“The River Towns Music Group did an awesome job making the event not just about the music: Vendors, kids activities, interesting features like an art exhibit, and other interesting components,” he said. “The venue can’t be beat, it’s right on the water, it’s awesome, and so all the factors made for a great event.”
Giaccio said the village is aiming to obtain additional sponsors and boost advance ticket sales to make Year Two more financially successful.
“Beyond the finances, it’s good for community spirit, it’s good for local businesses that were involved,” he said. It does bring in a lot of people from out of town to the village. All and all it was a big success for Year One.”
Ready for an Encore
The inaugural festival featured headliners Cold War Kids, Danielle Ponder, The Verve Pipe and the Nightingale All-Stars with Joan Osborne, John Popper and Jono Manson. Besides Giaccio’s band, local favorites Clare Maloney & the Great Adventure and Divining Rod also performed.
Attendees gave high marks to the festival in a post-event survey, praising the entertainment, food, drink and ticket prices, with nearly every respondent saying they’d be back next year. More than one-third of all respondents brought children along for the family-friendly event.
The producers are planning to bring in a wider variety of food and beverage options and make it easier for fans to access the vendors.
“For a first-year event, you never really know how people are going to flow into the venue, how the lines are going to be, how the layout’s going to be, how everything’s going to be received,” Goodyear said. “At the end of the day we were very pleased. There are a few areas that we plan to enhance and smooth out to bring a bigger and better Sleepy Hollow Music Festival for Year Two.”
Next year’s lineup has not been set, but Goodyear said it would include a mix of top national acts and local bands.
Giaccio, a singer-songwriter-guitarist, called performing at the festival “the No. 1 highlight of my musical career, for sure. The opportunity to play on a stage of that magnitude at the inaugural music festival with my original music. You didn’t have to worry about anything, you just got on stage, there’s an incredible sound system, and you just went for it.”
