When Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival organizers bought the farm, so to speak, in Manchester, Tenn., it was a good thing.

By purchasing 530 acres at the site where the four-day, multiple-stage, camping event takes place, organizers could build permanent stages and infrastructure, as well as make changes to the land itself, said Bonnaroo co-founder Rick Farman of Superfly Productions.

Most of the event’s 80,000 ticket buyers were expected to arrive Wednesday and today.

Music at Bonnaroo officially begins at 5:45 p.m. today and ends about 11:30 p.m. Sunday after a final set by Georgia-based jam band Widespread Panic. The festival features performances by more than 80 acts. Among the headliners scheduled to perform this year are Pearl Jam, Metallica, Kanye West, Chris Rock, Willie Nelson, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss with T-Bone Burnett.

Rick Farman

One thing that hasn’t changed is the traffic plan for getting people inside the site, according to Coffee County Sheriff Steve Graves. The gates, however, were to have opened at 5:30 this morning, a couple of hours earlier than last year. Organizers hoped the new time would help get festivalgoers “out of town and into the site quicker,” he said.

Festivalgoers again will be directed by signs to queue up on the right shoulder of Interstate 24, leaving the two lanes open to through traffic.

“We’ve gotten better every year (at moving traffic along),” Sheriff Graves said. “The first year it was a parking lot. They tried to tell us, and we didn’t believe it would happen that way.

“We didn’t have nearly enough people, but now with the addition of TDOT’s (Tennessee Department of Transportation) help, I don’t think it can get much better, unless they change the interstate so you can go directly into the site.”

He said he was not aware of any plans or talks to do that, however.

Superfly, which co-produces the event with Knoxville’s AC Entertainment, paid $8.6 million for the 530 acres that make up the actual festival area in 2007. The entire site, including access roads and leased buffer land, involves about 700 acres.

Festival staff members have been working year-round to prepare for this year’s festival, the seventh, Mr. Farman said.

“We are always making changes to the site, some of which most people won’t notice,” he said. “We now have our own walking path, and we’ve done some grading so the water gets out quicker, and we’ve built an earthen mound to help with that. But the biggest things are the entertainment things that we’ve added. There are some very cool things.”

Among the new offerings at the festival this year will be the Somethin’ Else New Orleans tent, which will feature music and food from the Big Easy. A donation is required for entry with proceeds going to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

“Superfly started in New Orleans, so we are excited about that,” Mr. Farman said.

He said that, for the first time, parts of the festival will be televised on Fuse TV, which will air six hours of programming and broadcast live from the event throughout the weekend.

For Clint Meadows, 19, of Dalton, Ga., the diversity of the artist lineup is what brought him back to Bonnaroo for the third year.

“I’ve been to quite a few festivals, but there is nothing like Bonnaroo,” he said. “Where else can you see Kanye West, Chris Rock and Metallica in the same place?”