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Coachella producer buys Firefly Music Festival in Delaware

Global Entertainment company AEG Presents, which runs California's Coachella festival, has purchased the Firefly Music Festival in Dover, Delaware.

The move comes four years after AEG and its subsidiary, Coachella founder Goldenvoice, partnered with Red Frog Events of Chicago to help produce and promote Firefly, becoming its majority owner. AEG recently acquired Red Frog's remaining shares.

"Red Frog identified a fantastic site, a great partner in Dover International Speedway and had a vision that they executed really, really well," said Melissa Ormond, chief operating officer of festivals for AEG Presents, told The Delaware News Journal in a Wednesday interview.

"Very few people -- even those of us who have been in the music business for decades -- are launching successful festivals in year one or year two," added Ormond, former president of Madison Square Garden Entertainment. "I have a tremendous amount of respect for what they did."

AEG instantly made its heft visible after joining with Red Frog by helping land Paul McCartney as a headliner for the 2015 festival, giving Firefly its first 90,000-person crowd.

AEG's festival portfolio now includes Firefly, California's Coachella and Stagecoach festivals and New York's Panorama, which will be held on Randall's Island July 27-29 with headliners Janet Jackson, The Killers and The Weeknd.

With AEG acquiring Red Frog's remaining ownership shares, the takeover of the seven-year-old festival by one of the world's biggest live music companies in the world is complete. Even so, organizers says fans will not see many radical changes, but improvements and tweaks are inevitably on the way.

With Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival moving its 2019 edition to Father's Day weekend, which had recently been Firefly's weekend, the Delaware event will move 2019's festival to the weekend after: June 20-23. (Officials are still unsure if the festival will kick off on Thursday or will be reduced to a three-night affair.)

Contact Ryan Cormier of The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier), Twitter (@ryancormier) and Instagram (@ryancormier).