Four stages, four sites, one week: how six all-terrain cranes put CMA Fest together
Maxim Crane Works deployed six Liebherr and Tadano all-terrain cranes across downtown Nashville to erect and dismantle the four main stages for CMA Fest 2025, a festival that drew about 95,000 people.
Fixed date, four separate sites
The festival ran from 5 to 8 June 2025, so the build had no float in it: every stage had to be up and certified before the gates opened. Maxim’s crane work ran from 28 May to 1 June across four locations with different ground, access and headroom — Nissan Stadium, the Chevy Vibes stage, the Hard Rock stage on Broadway and the Riverfront stage. The Broadway site in particular sits in one of the busiest pedestrian streets in the city, which constrained both crane footprint and working hours.
Crane by crane
Maxim built a site-specific lift plan for each stage rather than a single generic scheme, working from venue layouts and the festival’s own build sequence.
Maxim matched a machine to each stage rather than standardising on one class. The main stage at Nissan Stadium was built with a 110-ton Tadano ATF 100G-4 and dismantled afterwards with an 80-ton Liebherr LTM 1070-4.2. The Chevy Vibes stage went up on a 70-ton Liebherr LTM 1060-3.1, with an LTM 1070-4.2 brought in for the strike. The Hard Rock stage on Broadway needed the smallest footprint of the four and was handled at both ends by a 65-ton Liebherr LTM 1055-3.2. The Riverfront stage was erected with a 70-ton LTM 1060-3.1 fitted with a 52-foot swing-around jib to reach over the structure.
Sizing down where possible is deliberate on a job like this. A 65-ton machine that can be set up and struck inside a single road closure is worth more on Broadway than a larger crane that needs a bigger exclusion zone, even if the loads themselves are modest.
Thirty hours on the hook
Total crane time across the four sites came to about 30 man hours, completed without a safety incident, and all four stages were handed over on schedule so that the festival opened to an estimated 95,000 attendees. Maxim has supplied cranes to CMA Fest for more than 15 years, a relationship that dates back to 2008 under the AmQuip name — useful continuity on a job where the same set-up positions and the same street closures recur every June. Knowing which corner of Nissan Stadium a 110-ton machine can be rigged in, and how long the city will allow Broadway to be shut, is the kind of information that does not appear on a load chart.
Source: Maxim Crane Works — Photos: Maxim Crane Works