Imagine planning a massive music festival, canceling it and then planning it all over again, not knowing if you’d just have to cancel it again. That’s been the routine for Life Is Beautiful organizers during the past year, as the pandemic crushed live entertainment across the world.

“We installed a mentality within the team, this mantra of, “Make a plan, break a plan, make a new plan,” LIB Partner Justin Weniger tells the Weekly.

“We felt a heightened sense of responsibility to our community, knowing how important this would be in a city that relies so heavily on entertainment and live events to drive household income,” Weniger continues. “So we always wanted to be ready for the moment when COVID was starting to break and the timing was looking right, so that we’d be in a position to send a signal to the rest of the world that Las Vegas is back and open for business, and that you can start planning travel to Vegas again.”

For those considering attending Life Is Beautiful in 2021, today brings big news, in the form of a 60-plus-act music lineup, set to perform on the festival’s Downtown Las Vegas street stages September 17-19. Following last week's sold-out early-bird ticket offering, the remainder of the passes for LIB’s eighth edition—and first since 2019—will go on sale March 12 at 10 a.m. Vegas time at lifeisbeautiful.com, with prices starting at $330, plus taxes and fees.

The top of this year’s bill is eye-catching and diverse: singer-songwriter Billie Eilish, who swept the major awards at the 2020 Grammys (Song, Record, Album and New Artist); pop-punk favorite Green Day, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015; Aussie group Tame Impala, which fuses psychedelic rock and dancey pop; and rapper A$AP Rocky, whose three albums have charted in Billboard’s top 5 and who averages 17 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

From there, the lineup veers all over the musical map, scooping up popular electronic artists like Illenium, Fisher and Dillon Francis; enduring rock-oriented acts like St. Vincent, Modest Mouse, Haim and Death From Above 1979; and celebrated hip-hop names like EarthGang, Young Thug and Ludacris. 

Also on the poster: Glass Animals, 6lack, Don Toliver, Lany, Brittany Howard, San Holo, JID, Surfaces, Gorgon City, All Time Low, Ekali, Purity Ring, Ashnikko, Shaed, Trevor Daniel, Drama, Cash Cash, Surf Mesa, Still Woozy, Noah Cyrus, Caamp, Yaeji, CloZee, Shiba San, Lost Frequencies, Emotional Oranges, Joel Corry, Remi Wolf, Celeste, Half Alive, Jamila Woods, White Reaper, Slenderbodies, BIA, Lsdream, Notd, Ant Clemons, Mob Rich, Amy Allen, Evan Giia, Ford., The Backseat Lovers, Sir Chloe, Teddy Swims, Brijean, Poorstacy, Ekoh, Midnight Kids and Monoky.

Weniger says roughly 75% of the bill has changed since LIB booked its never-revealed 2020 lineup, allowing the festival to better reflect not only evolving tastes, but the different ways the public has absorbed music since the pandemic began.

“We wanted to make sure we were doing something relevant to the time,” he says. “Artists started to build much more of a one-to-one relationship with their fans through things like Instagram Live and, more recently, bigger, scaled-up livestream productions. So we were looking at that to see what’s been trending.”

Participants for LIB’s other prongs—food, art, comedy and ideas—will be revealed in the coming months.

As for concerns that COVID-19 numbers, which have been trending down in recent weeks, could rise again and scuttle the festival for a second year, Weniger says his team will continue thinking positively but planning for all eventualities.

“It’s looking more likely that by the time we get to fall, anyone who wants to get the vaccine will be able to get it, so we’re pretty optimistic that we’ll be in a much more open environment,” Weniger says. “But we’re also being very diligent about safety practices while planning for multiple scenarios. And of course, if we ever couldn’t guarantee that we could produce a safe environment, we would refund all tickets immediately. We would never risk the safety of our guests.”

In addition to whatever pandemic-era protocols are in place, Life Is Beautiful’s 2021 edition will feel different for another reason: the absence of longtime supporter Tony Hsieh, who died in November. Weniger says attendees should expect this year’s fest to honor Hsieh’s legacy.

“The best gifts that Tony gave us were the belief to think audaciously and a strong desire to shift the perspective from the problems within a community to the possibilities of that community,” Weniger says. “That has guided us from a small local festival to something that’s internationally recognized and successful on its own.”