We were robbed of a Daisy Jones & The Six set at Lollapalooza

Look what they’ve taken from us, Jonesheads! Our beloved Daisy Jones & The Six was largely snubbed during awards season—it didn’t even get nominated for the Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics Emmy, despite giving us the ultimate earworm “Honeycomb (Look At Us Now).” Now we come to find out we were actually supposed to get a real festival appearance from the fictional band that never materialized and now, probably never will. Has any fandom suffered more?

It’s not a surprise that the band had something in the works—last year, they (meaning Riley Keough, Sam Claflin, Suki Waterhouse, Josh Whitehouse, Will Harrison, and Sebastian Chacon) posted on social media rehearsing for a live performance that never ended up happening. There was actually talk that they were supposed to perform at the Emmys, but now Waterhouse has confirmed that a set at Chicago music festival Lollapalooza had been in the works. “That whole thing was planned, we got people visas, like, it was an operation. And then the SAG strike happened, so we all decided that we should not perform at Lollapalooza,” the actor-singer said in a vlog from the 2023 festival posted to her YouTube channel on Thursday. “But I am looking out my window today, just sad that they’re not here.”

While it is a complete and total bummer that we never got a live Daisy Jones & The Six set, the question remains: Why didn’t they do a live show before Lolla? The miniseries came out well before the actors strike began, and the stars did a fair amount of promo in which they discussed, extensively, how they all learned to sing and play instruments for the show. The moment to put those guys on stage was in March, when the show was premiering, and they could do a set on a friendly stage like The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, or something. It seems like the obvious play, and one that might’ve actually secured them that Original Music and Lyrics Emmy nom!

The fact is, Amazon Prime Video doesn’t seem that good at promoting its content. Just today, on a random Thursday afternoon, the platform released the music video for “Guard Down” by August Moon, the fake boyband from The Idea Of You starring Nicholas Galitzine and Anne Hathaway. Now, The Idea Of You is plenty successful, but the music video would’ve been a much more useful promotion leading up to the movie’s premiere, or at least immediately afterwards—not two weeks after the fact. This seems incredibly obvious to us, but for some reason Prime Video is pretty laissez-faire about their own novelty content.

Anyway, it’s a sad day for those of us who had all the songs from Aurora by Daisy Jones & The Six in their Spotify Wrapped, because if Prime didn’t exert the time, energy, and dollars to put that band on a stage in Spring 2023, they’re sure not going to do so now that the entertainment landscape has entirely moved on. Ah, well. We’ll always have Soldier Field.