Lake Murray’s lone remaining floating music festival moves to the shore. What to expect
.JPG "The Reggaetronic Lake Murray Music Festival will shift to being held on land for this year’s iteration, a two-day festival on May 31 and June 1.")
Lake Murray’s only remaining floating music festival, which has been drawing thousands to the Midlands area for more than a decade, will move to the shore, organizers announced Thursday.
The Reggaetronic Lake Murray Music Festival will move its long-floating stage to land for its upcoming two-day festival, rebranded as the Lake Murray Palooza, and offer festival-goers the option of enjoying from land or by boat.
The shift comes after Reggaetronic became the sole floating music festival on Lake Murray last summer. The Drift Jam Flotilla Music Festival moved to land last-minute during its final iteration in June of last year following issues securing barges to hold the stage. Reggaetronic founder Ronnie Alexander said some of those same “logistical nightmares” for his event caused him to revisit how he held the festival this year.
“Last year, we weren’t even able to find barges until two weeks prior, which kind of makes it a gamble promoting it,” Alexander said. “People donate their time, their equipment every year … I think this makes it easier on everybody.”
Scheduling conflicts, a shortage of available barges as a result of them being used in construction projects on Interstate 26 and unpredictable wind or weather conditions are all parts of the planning process that made the floating festival difficult to organize.
Reggaetronic, which bills itself as the state’s “longest running flotilla music festival,” began in 2011 and has long featured music from genres like reggae, funk and rock.
The new festival will take place at the Fat Frogs Marina, a boating club housed in what used to be the lakeside bar Frayed Knot, on May 31 and June 1. That’s the same spot Drift Jam used for its land-bound finale last summer.
Alexander said he expects to have around the same number of boats — the festival drew 13,000 people on 2,200 boats in 2023 — in attendance by boat this year and hopes to sell anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 tickets for folks on land.
Alexander said he gets “thousands of messages” every year from people asking how they can attend if they don’t own a boat. The changes, along with widening out the variety of artists at the festival and introducing different genres, are all for the better, Alexander said.
Unlike previous years, the festival will feature what Alexander called a “vendor village,” with local food trucks and artisan vendors selling things like crafts or artwork.
“I feel the lake has been missing that aspect. The con is, yeah you don’t get that ‘wow’ factor [with all the boats], but the pro is you get the benefit of people setting up in a true festival atmosphere,” Alexander said.
Headliners for the two-day event are still being decided, Alexander told The State, but he expects tickets to remain around the same price for VIP boats and around $25 for general admission on land. As to whether he’ll ever bring back the floating-only aspect, he didn’t rule it out. But it’s not likely.
“Not to say we won’t do it again, but if this goes successful we’d be hard-pressed to go backwards,” Alexander said.
This story was originally published March 21, 2025 at 12:27 PM.
