Photo Credit: little5pointsofficial Instagram page. Promotional poster created for the 2026 Little 5 Fest.
ATLANTA — On March 28, Little Five Points — a commercial district located in east Atlanta — hosted its annual “Little 5 Fest.” Live music, pop-up vendors and heaps of controversy were all stirred at one of the city’s biggest community-driven events of the year.
Being held in a large, closed-off section of Seminole Avenue Northeast, the event was contained predominantly on a single strip of road.
Lasting from noon to 8pm, Little 5 Fest held concentrations of vendors and informational tables, allowing eventgoers to do anything from thrift for clothes to become more integrated in their local communities.
Tents selling pottery, paintings, jewelry and other mediums of art were also sold for purchase at the vendor tents. This, combined with drink and food vendors, made the event function as a true self-sustaining festival.
For Thurston, the music director for Album 88 — a local radio station run by students at Georgia State University — the impact that Little 5 Fest has is directly correlated to social outreach.
“I think Little 5 Fest helps organizations like ourselves and all these other vendors,” Thurston said. “Putting [themselves] out there in a place where they think like-minded people might be … I think it helps either give organizations a platform or further the platform they already have.”
The two music stages present at the event — Cul-de-sac and Seminole — were the platforms on which a multitude of Atlanta-based music acts performed. A variety of music genres, ranging from shoegaze to hardcore punk, were represented at the event.
While the event itself was a major success in pushing vendors, communities and musicians into the limelight, the festival wasn’t without its fair share of controversy surrounding it.
A collection of Instagram posts uploaded to the platform in the coming days before the event highlighted Little Five Fest’s event sponsors. Among these were the Coca-Cola Company’s Mr. Pibb and Glaceau’s Smartwater, as well as Intuit’s TurboTax.
Initial reaction to the posts was very combative, as users were quick to point out Coca-Cola’s alleged role in the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Commenters made their feelings known, with user @_jotunn condemning the organizers for aligning themselves with these companies sponsoring local events.
“This is very disappointing, honestly. Hoping this partnership is cut off, we don’t need any corporate sponsorship gentrifying the local scene,” the user said.
Coca-Cola’s involvement in the ongoing Israeli Palestinian conflict sees the prospect of manufacturing as geographically problematic.
WhoProfits, an independent research organization that investigates the economic sector within Israeli-occupied territories, reports that Coca-Cola Israel operates its regional distribution and cooling houses inside illegal Israeli-occupied sections of the West Bank.
Many individuals showed up to the event to strongly condemn the companies, as well as give out pamphlets and QR codes with links to informational aggregators that shine light on the background of some of the event’s sponsors.
For many of the bands playing, this clash between corporate sponsorship and the DIY music scene is extremely important to both highlight and research.
Leaky Faucet of the band Femwad weighed in heavily on Little 5 Fest’s sponsorship involvement, saying, “I think we have plenty of money in the community to invest in ourselves and keep it DIY, punk is so anti-corporate that it’s kind of crazy to see corporations sponsor an event like this.”
Little 5 Fest will hopefully return for its fourth consecutive year in 2027.
