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Arts Playlist: The Ladybug Music Festival expands to Milford

A free block party putting the spotlight on women in music is coming to Milford this fall.

 

It's called the Ladybug Music Festival.

After six successful years in Wilmington, Gable Music Ventures is partnering with Downtown Milford, Inc. to bring a version of the Ladybug Music Festival to Milford on Saturday, September 22.

“We’re so excited," said Gable Music Ventures Chief Executive Officer Gayle Dillman. "This will be the first time that we moved the event to a different location other than downtown Wilmington. Being a woman in the music business, as we all know, it’s a pretty male-dominated business, and the Ladybug Music Festival is a celebration of women in music.”

The Ladybug Music Festival launched in Wilmington in 2012 with 20 acts and 300 attendees that year. It’s grown each year since - reaching to 75 acts and 10,000 attendees over two days in 2017.

Dillman says they plan to release the names of artists scheduled to play at the one-day Ladybug Music Festival in Milford sometime in July.  The event will take place on stages on Walnut Street and in many local shops and empty storefronts in the downtown area in Milford.

 

Dillman says the expansion to Milford was hatched when she and her partner Jeremy Hebbel, Gable’s president and chief operating officer, were driving south and decided to take a detour.

 

“And we drove into the main street and like, we both basically stopped there and just said, “this is an amazing street, this is an amazing place.” We went into a couple of businesses and we were talking to that about what goes on down there and each one of them kept saying, “you gotta go talk to this one, you gotta go talk to that one,” and we ended of up at Gallery 37, speaking with Marcia Reed about music and events,” said Dillman.

 
The Wilmington version of the Ladybug festival is scheduled for July 20th and 21st.

Past acts in Wilmington include national headliners Mary Lambert, Larkin Poe and Caroline Rose. Local headliners Nadjah, Nalani & Sarina, and Angela Sheik have all performed five of the event's six years in Wilmington.

Organizers say they are looking for local female artists to play at the inaugural event in Milford in September.

 
Delaware Public Media' s arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from theDelaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.

Kelli Steele has over 30 years of experience covering news in Delaware, Baltimore, Winchester, Virginia, Phoenix, Arizona and San Diego, California.