Photo courtesy My Guerrilla on Flickr

Austin’s C3 Presents now has three major festivals to go along with their trio of Charlies. The producers of Lollapalooza and the Austin City Limits Festival will put on the Vineland Music Festival in rural New Jersey Aug. 8 to 10, 2008.

Vineland is a joint venture with Melvin Benn’s Festival Republic. The U.K. event producer’s portfolio includes the Reading, Leeds and Glastonbury festivals. Set on a 550-acre farm with capacity estimated between 80,000 and 150,000, Vineland will be C3’s first foray into the camping-focused mega-fest.

"The idea is to take a European-style model and blend it with a more customer-friendly model like ACL and Lollapalooza, which have been in an urban park setting, and create something that's like no other festival in the world," said C3 partner Charlie Jones.

[the music festival capital of the world]

The annual Plug Independent Music Awards has been a solid arbiter of awesomeness since 2005. This year, the Plug cartel has nominated three Austin events for Music Festival of the Year. The Austin City Limits Festival, South By Southwest and the fresh-face Fun Fun Fun Fest made the short list of twelve along with C3’s Lollapalooza.

Austin is well represented across the boards at Plug. Spoon is up for Album, Indie Rock Album, Artist and Song of the Year. Okkervil River earned props for Indie Rock Album and Artist. Both Waterloo Records and Emo’s were nominated in their respective categories. Fellow Texans Iron & Wine, St. Vincent and Gorilla vs. Bear were also nominated.

[band bites]

After sweeping the Austin Music Awards in March, earning SXSW props from rock luminaries like David Fricke, releasing their third LP this fall, playing 75 shows in three months, Octopus Project is home for the holidays. Voxtrot wraps up their whirlwind road trip with a run of West Coast shows next week. They plan to take time off from touring in 2008 to write and record their next album. Up in Denton, Shearwater is well into their new album and will begin mixing next week. And on Friday, Zookeeper will be the featured Artist of the Day on Spin.com. White Denim was named Artist of the Day earlier this week.