RALEIGH, N.C. – In spite of a weather delay on opening day, the Dreamville Festival is expected to bring nearly $8 million in revenue to the region.

What You Need To Know

  •  The Dreamville music festival has a delayed start of 3 p.m. due to rain, wind and possible lightning

  •  Visit Raleigh estimates the festival will bring $7.8 million in revenue to the region

  •  Last year, around 80% of ticket holders for the sold-out event were from visitors, from all 50 states and 12 countries, according to Visit Raleigh 

On Saturday morning, festival organizers pushed back the start time to 3 p.m. due to expected rain, wind and lightning. 

Despite a muddy start, local leaders say the event is expected to bring in the most people ever, with expected attendance of about 50,000 per day.

Related: Food vendor ready to cook up a profit for Dreamville

The festival was started by rapper and Fayetteville native J. Cole.

Loren Gold, the executive vice president of the Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau, says Visit Raleigh works as a sponsor for the festival and provides metrics from attendance.

“We're really excited for this year's event,” Gold said. “We're also really excited to kind of dive into the post-event data, and we'll probably have an updated number probably within two weeks after this year's event.”

Gold says last year, the total revenue was about $6.7 million with around 40,000 people a day for the two days.

“Subsequently, last year, we saw a measurement of about 80% of all ticket holders were visitors. So, they were either day trippers or overnight visitors. We had ticket holders from all 50 states, 12 international countries,” he said.

Altogether, Gold says events like Dreamville help to put both Raleigh and the state of North Carolina on the map to bring in future opportunities.

“So many of the fans are first timers to Raleigh. In fact, even some of the musicians have never played in Raleigh before to come in for the event. It's also something that I think both the city and the traditional chamber, kind of B2B economic development channel takes a look at,” Gold said.