Omaha Magazine Article: The Maha Comeback

Omaha Magazine, July 2025 – Maha Festival is back. And so are its founders.

Mike App, Tre Brashear, Tyler Owen, and Mike Toohey are the four Omaha businessmen who got together more than 15 years ago and hatched an idea for a nonprofit music festival that would bring the people of Omaha together. Their emotional and physical—and monetary—investment to birth Maha was their gift to the city.

They were also the ones who, after 10 years of Maha, went and created the for-profit Outlandia music festival. But after Maha stumbled in 2024, the festival and its founders are back together and humming right along.

“It was always a good idea and always good for the community,” Owen said. “There are so many people who are proud of Omaha because of this. I just feel happy it can survive.”

Indie rock legends The Pixies will headline Maha Festival alongside an undercard that features indie rock luminaries Silversun Pickups, Waxahatchee, Band of Horses, and others. The festival returns to its original home on the Omaha RiverFront on Aug. 2.

The four founders returned to guide the festival after it took a year off. It’s a long way off from 2009, when the foursome stood on a balcony outside a riverfront restaurant and announced their plans.

App, Brashear, Owen, and Toohey told gathered reporters—this one included—that they were launching a music festival. Nobody knew a thing about it before an email landed in inboxes the previous week. And here it was, coming that August with a few notable indie/alternative bands.

In the first years of the festival, the quartet did everything they could to put on the festival.  Everything. Fold towels. Assemble packages for VIP ticket holders. Shop for groceries. Raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. Arrange flights for artists. And write checks, too.

The formation of Maha goes back nearly 20 years. Brashear and App wondered why Omaha—then one of the country’s biggest indie rock hotspots—didn’t have its own big festival. It seemed like a no-brainer. App, Brashear, Owen, and Toohey eventually came together to form the festival’s initial board. They incorporated as a nonprofit in 2008 and began organizing the first festival, which took place about a year later.

“There wasn’t all the opportunity,” Brashear said. “There was nothing really for younger people of this type. I wanted there to be something that became part of summer…part of the rhythm of life. I wanted to do something that mattered to people and Omaha got to feel good.”

Attendance in the first year of the festival, when Dashboard Confessional and Big Head Todd & the Monsters headlined the now-gone expansive concrete patio at Omaha’s Lewis & Clark Landing, was a mere 1,900 (those “official” numbers may have been inflated).

Expenses were $250,000. The festival lost money. The founders wrote checks—personal checks—to cover the loss.

But they kept going. Attendance at Maha steadily grew. So did sponsorships. So did—no offense to Dashboard or Big Head Todd—the caliber of the artists. Maha also moved to a larger, more comfortable venue in the heart of Omaha.

In later years, they scored some huge headliners. Weezer. Spoon. Death Cab For Cutie. Run the Jewels after their biggest album ever was released. Lizzo just as she exploded onto the scene.

The way the four founders designed Maha was to build it for the community. It was a nonprofit. There was a rotating board. And while they were always intimately involved—Brashear was the festival’s first president—they also intended to hand it over. And so they did.

After several years, a succession of presidents took over. New board members rotated in while others rotated out. Full-time staff was hired. Of course, App, Brashear, Owen, and Toohey still maintained founder status. But that meant mostly giving advice, helping out occasionally, and standing on stage at the end of the festival to be recognized by the Maha staff, volunteers, board, and the assembled thousands.

But that changed, too.

Owen hosted Vice President Mike Pence at an Omaha event prior to the 2020 election. That caused a social media firestorm, and Maha eventually released a statement regarding “the political event hosted by a Maha co-founder.” The one-sentence statement about “hosting diverse lineups and a safe and inclusive environment for all” didn’t mention Owen by name, but his name was removed from the site as a founder.

Owen decided he was done with Maha, so he went off and made his own festival, the for-profit Outlandia.

Owen recruited friends and investors. He brought in 1% Productions, Maha’s longtime talent booker and production group that had been replaced by an out-of-town agency. He found a gorgeous festival site in the verdant Falconwood Park.

And Outlandia landed what some—the Maha founders included—would consider dream lineups. The concert posters and the festival stage were topped by indie rock legends such as Wilco, The National, Band of Horses, Modest Mouse, Lord Huron, Jimmy Eat World, Flaming Lips, The Head and the Heart.

And the crowds came, too.

Summer evenings at Outlandia were filled with people and supremely good music that poured out over the green, tree-lined festival lawn. It was a music festival dream, if you’re the kind of person who dreams of such things.

Meanwhile, Maha persisted, but not without some bumps. After a break in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, production costs went up, too. Additionally, no subsequent Maha artist was nearly as popular as Weezer or Lizzo.

Maha’s executive directors left. Ticket sales were way down in 2023, “very much in the ditch,” Maha board president TJ Twit said. And an additional difficult factor: recent Maha lineups attracted younger audiences. Whether because they’re not of age, consume alcohol less, or prefer imbibing THC, younger audiences tend to not drink as much, which means less revenue for the festival.

Then, in 2024, the festival outright canceled. Released several months before the planned event, an official statement cited “a need to rework Maha’s operating model combined with industry-wide increases in costs for talent, transportation, labor, security, and insurance.”

Meanwhile, Outlandia continued on. Year two was a fantastic success. Year three was much harder.

Both Maha and Outlandia were always difficult to pull off. Organizers of both festivals admitted that while the festivals always marketed themselves as a success, they were extremely difficult to get to break even. Years that were massive successes were offset by years that were total failures—at least financially speaking.

“It’s just a fiction that these things make money,” Brashear said. “Festivals close left and right. And Omaha is awash in good music opportunities. There’s a finite number of dollars.”

Both Maha and Outlandia ended with down years. C3 Presents, which puts on Austin City Limits, Lollapalooza, and other festivals, then offered to buy Maha.

“Lock, stock and barrel,” Twit said.

But the talk of a sale never went anywhere. Seeing an outside group want to take this very Omaha thing made everyone involved all the more determined to resurrect it.

“When we made the decision not to sell it, it reignited everybody’s interest in having it be locally run,” Twit said.

“I think it’s because so many people in Omaha think it’s so important, and it’s something we created and did together,” Toohey added.

There was hope. Nobody wanted to see Maha die. Twit met with Owen. The topic: How can we save Maha? How can we keep it alive?

“If these guys don’t get back involved, there’s just no way this happens,” Twit said. “I knew it would be a ton of work and time that would be required without having paid staff to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but it wasn’t a huge leap of faith. If these guys are in, we’re going to be okay.”

The four are now listed as both the festival’s founders and as an advisory committee. App, for his part, is back on the board as treasurer.

The next decision was to scale Maha back to what’s most important.

“Let’s get back to the core thing, which is a one-day music festival,” Toohey said.

Then came organizing the festival: 1% Productions was brought back as booker and production company, and the lineup—always a difficult beast to wrangle—solidified with Pixies at the top of the card.

So far, so good.

After the announcement of this year’s lineup, tickets sold. Fast. The first week of ticket sales in 2025 were equivalent to months of ticket sales from some previous years, Maha organizers said.

“We’ve had the best ticket sales in one week that we’ve ever had,” Owen said.

But most important on the group’s mind: After 15 years of Maha, how do they ensure it continues well into the future? How does it become sustainable? How does this thing—this wonderful, beautiful, bright festival that brings so many people together every summer—keep going?

“It’s off to a good start,” Owen said. “But we’ve said this for 15 years. It’s got to sustain itself.”

“Having it come back is fantastic, and we need to figure out how to make it last,” Toohey added.

Ticket sales don’t cover the cost of putting on the event. It has to come from sales of food, booze, and merch, but most importantly, donations and sponsorships.

The group has been hard at work ensuring Maha has enough to not just happen in 2025, but to keep going well into the future.

“You can’t be at the church and pass the hat every Sunday,” Owen said. “You need sponsors and donors who sign multi-year commitments.”

“Sponsors aren’t going to give you money unless you prove that you’re repeatable. So, this year has to validate that it can be done,” Brashear added.

The community response to Maha’s return has validated their hard work. Every donation. Every ticket sold. Every positive social media comment.

“The rewarding part about Maha for me is those validations,” Twit said.

And the festival itself, of course.

“When we’re there and watching the crowd, that moment will sink in,” Twit said. “I actually always get a little sad. Right when the headliner starts…I think, ‘In an hour, this whole thing is gonna be over.’”

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