The Big Barrel Country Music Festival made it’s debut to the world Friday afternoon, with little to no traffic throughout the morning and minimal mud throughout the day.  The Woodlands of Dover International Speedway opened up for the new event with a setup similar to the annual Firefly Music Festival, however, there were differences.

        

Compared to the 90,000 festival attendees at the Firefly Music Festival, throughout the weekend, Big Barrel Country Music Festival will see about 30,000 guests. During Firefly, there were four stages, The Lawn Stage, The Backyard Stage, The Pavilion Stage and The Coffee House Stage, with at least two performances going on at all times, but that isn’t the case for Big Barrel. Big Barrel has two stages, The Big Barrel Main Stage and The Wildwood stage.

The Main Stage is in the same location as Firefly’s Main Stages but the general admission and VIP areas are set up different. During Firefly, the general admission standing room is available throughout the whole lawn in front of the stage and the VIP areas are on the sides of the stages. For Big Barrel, the VIP area is directly in front of the stage and general admission is pushed behind that.

Throughout the day, performances at Big Barrel last anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour and you are able to walk back and forth between stage to stage in just a few minutes, unlike Firefly. The layout of the stages for Big Barrel is very convenient because the performances on each stage are so close to each other, opposed to Firefly when they were overlapping and you had to make a decision on who you wanted to see.

At Big Barrel, there are people from all age ranges attending the festival. There are babies on shoulders, toddlers in strollers, teenagers, middle-agers, seniors, you name it. This is extremely different from Firefly, where it seemed for the most part, everyone was able 10-20 years of age of each other.

Lastly, the attire is completely different. During Firefly, girls were seen wearing flowy dresses and flowers in their hair, and guys were typically shirtless, with shorts and flip flops. During Big Barrel Music Festival, there are a lot of American flags, bandannas, work boots, cut off shirts and sequins shirts.

Although the two festivals are in the same location and are both put on by Red Frog Events, there are several differences including the $249 price tag for Firefly and $99 ticket sale for Big Barrel.