Electronic music festival that brought Shaq to Columbia Speedway hits pause for 2025
.jpg "The Hidden City Music Festival will not return to Cayce this year. Organizers will instead host a concert at Columbia rock club The Senate.")
An electronic music festival that brought thousands, including basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, to the city of Cayce last year will hit pause for a year amid internal changes at the production group that operates the festival.
In place of this year’s event, Hidden City Music Festival, which first began bringing EDM artists to the Historic Columbia Speedway in 2022, will bring a smaller concert to The Senate, a mid-sized live music venue right near the S.C. Statehouse. That concert was set to feature four artists — DrinkUrWater, Wonkywilla, Name Unknown and Goo. — Saturday, April 5.
“This will serve us better in the future rather than putting on a rushed show this year. People have come to expect a grand show and if we’d rushed, it wouldn’t have been anything like it should’ve been,” Joseph McDougall, one of the organizers of the festival, said.
In previous years, the music festival has drawn between 4,000 to 6,000 folks to the nine acres along Charleston Highway, McDougall told The State. The Senate’s capacity is 1,200. Organizers hope to bring the festival back to the speedway next year.
McDougall cited “internal changes” that happened within the production company, but said he was unable to elaborate further for legal reasons, when asked why the festival is on pause this year.
“Once that finally got resolved, we had maybe two months to scramble to put it together. And with a festival this big, we needed to be starting in August, not February,” McDougall said.
At the speedway, the festival brought names like Steve Aoki, an electronic music artist with nearly 3 billion streams to his name, and Shaquille O’Neal, who outside of his stardom as a former basketball player and current media personality for sports networks also makes music and DJs.
Hidden City has also drawn ire from neighbors of the speedway. After complaints in its first year, including a ticket for high noise levels, festival organizers implemented measures to better the relationship between the festival and nearby residents: a request for an extension on the city’s noise ordinance by 30 minutes, workers monitoring decibel levels around the neighborhoods, and door hangers distributed prior to the event.
The changes improved the initially rocky relationship with the city and McDougall said the pause this year wasn’t related to the city or its neighbors.
McDougall said the intention is to bring the festival back to the speedway in the spring of next year.
“There’s tons of EDM lovers in the Carolinas, but there’s really only a couple places doing any large-scale festivals and, being from Columbia, we’ve always wanted to bring this community to Columbia,” McDougall said.
This story was originally published April 2, 2025 at 1:57 PM.
