You’ve heard of Afro Nation. You’ve probably heard of Rolling Loud. And there’s a decent chance Broccoli City rings a bell too. But the DMV’s own Afro Plus Fest (Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia region, for those unacquainted) has been quietly outgrowing all three, and the upcoming Labor Day weekend will prove it.
Afro Plus Fest returns for its second year at Northwest Stadium in Landover, Maryland, expanding from a single day to a full three-day weekend, with Davido, Wizkid, Alkaline, Tems, and Ayra Starr headlining the main stage alongside special guests Lil Baby, Latto, Chief Keef, and Sexyy Red.
Last year’s debut at RFK Stadium sold out, pulling in 20,000 people and generating an estimated $10 million in local economic impact in a single day, with a turnaround the festival’s organizers pulled off in just 80 days from start to finish. This year, founder Michael Awosanya is projecting 120,000 attendees across the weekend, with economic impact he expects to land somewhere between $40 and $60 million.
Those numbers may sound like a fluke for a festival that’s only two years old, particularly because festivals that have been around nearly a decade can’t even pull those numbers. But it’s no fluke. Just the grit, determination and a little bit of insanity of a first-generation African kid from the DMV who spent over a decade in the party promotion trenches before he ever touched a stadium.
“I have experience with events. I am still learning with the festival,” Awosanya said.
He started as a college party promoter at Towson University in 2014, running African Student Association events, DJ battles, and dance competitions with the same core team that’s still around him today. In 2022, that same crew attempted a smaller festival called Heat Wave, and it went bad. Real bad, Michael Jackson. (In the words of Old Kanye). “We had about four or 5000 people and like 1000 people didn’t get in,” he said.
That failure sent him on a two- to three-year research mission, traveling to study other festivals and building relationships before Heat Wave DC was reborn as Afro Plus Fest at RFK Stadium in 2025.
The RFK run only lasted one year. Awosanya moved the festival again in 2026, this time to Prince George’s County, a county that’s been positioning itself as the region’s next big investment target. Projects like the $1.3 billion Sphere entertainment venue heading to National Harbor are part of that push, and Awosanya sees Afro Plus Fest fitting into the same wave.
“A lot of us are, you know, where a lot of us are from Prince George County,” he said, pointing to DC promoters and event curators who trace their roots back to the county. “So bringing it back home and being able to boost that Prince George’s County economy is something that I look forward to doing.”
DC still matters to him, and he was clear the festival isn’t abandoning it. But RFK Stadium is going dark for festivals until 2030 because of the Commanders’ return, and that timeline is what pushed Northwest Stadium from a one-off venue into something closer to a permanent home.
A permanent home changes the math for everyone tied to the festival, starting with the people selling food and merchandise on the ground. The vendors setting up at that new home stand to make real money, even in a festival that hasn’t turned a profit yet. Awosanya said the average vendor cleared $22,000 after last year’s single-day event.
“That was our average for a vendor for a one-day festival,” he said. The festival itself isn’t there yet financially. “We’re one of the only independent Black festivals left,” Awosanya said, noting his team doesn’t have the AmEx or Visa sponsorship deals that AEG and Live Nation properties can lock down.
That gap between the money circulating through the festival and the money the festival itself is making shapes how he talks about competition. “We don’t currently have competition,” he said.
Afro Plus Fest moves through hip hop, dancehall, Afrobeats, and R&B on the same bill. That range makes the festival hard to categorize, which in turn makes it harder to pitch to sponsors chasing one clean genre lane. He names three festivals when asked who he studies, though. Rolling Loud, for how hard they go for their core crowd. Broccoli City, for putting DMV artists on stages years before anyone else was checking for them. And then of course, Coachella, mostly just for what scale looks like once you get there.
Broccoli City’s approach in particular shows up directly in this year’s lineup, where 10 to 15 DMV-based artists are booked, and the DJ roster is almost entirely local. Awosanya built that in on purpose, through what he calls the “Made in the DMV” segment. He’d watched local DJs get passed over for bigger names for years, some of them a decade into their careers.
“Ninety percent of the DJs in the DMV do not get the opportunity to play in front of 20, 30, 40,000 people,” he said.
Those crowd sizes are still something Awosanya himself is adjusting to. His mother, who watched the festival take shape from the beginning, wasn’t ready for what that many people actually looks like in person. “She’s shocked — that many people,” Awosanya said, describing his own reaction to walking the festival grounds himself. “I literally walked the festival like three times. I didn’t see anybody I knew.” He’s used to running rooms where he knows at least half the crowd, but not recognizing a single face is what made the size of it real to him.
That growth runs through a team that’s mostly stayed intact for over a decade. Derek handles production, and Bre handles marketing, both with Awosanya since 2014. Grace has run the festival side of things for close to ten years now. His sister Boosie serves as director of partnerships on top of working full time as an OB-GYN. Awosanya still handles most of the financial and sales work himself.
That team is what he’s counting on as he looks past this weekend toward what comes next. Expansion is already on his mind, with Houston, Dallas, Toronto, and London all mentioned as markets where the Afro-Caribbean audience is dense enough to support a version of what he’s built in the DMV.
None of that is locked in quite yet, because before they take it further, they’re gearing up for what will be a history-making second year during Labor Day weekend at Northwest Stadium, where he’ll host 120,000 people in his own backyard.
Not bad for the biggest music festival you’ve probably never heard of.