A&E

Welcome to Festival Las Vegas: How this city became a multiday music mecca

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Life Is Beautiful
Photo: Wade Vandervort

EDC is back, incredibly, for its second dance music mega-festival in seven months at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Hundreds of thousands of revelers will once again travel to Las Vegas to catch hundreds of star DJs and celebrate across an undeniably spectacular festival landscape May 20-22, and the crowd will consist of many of the same people who visited in October to partake in the pandemic-postponed comeback of one of the largest annual events of any kind in our Valley.

It’s a big thing, but one that has quickly become typical in a town that could add City of Music Festivals to its already-bursting résumé.

This year has seen the inaugural Afterparty NFT Art & Music Festival at Area15 in March; the 25th-anniversary edition of the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender at the Orleans in April; the Vibra Urbana reggaeton and Latin music fest in April at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds; and the recent Lovers & Friends— a star-studded array of veteran R&B and hip-hop acts—at those same Festival Grounds.

And Las Vegas’ 2022 festival calendar will stay packed, with the hard-rocking Psycho Las Vegas fest August 19-21 at Resorts World; the Big Blues Bender August 25-28 at Westgate; the sprawling Life Is Beautiful September 16-18 on the streets of Downtown Las Vegas; the iHeartRadio Music Festival September 23-24 at T-Mobile Arena and Area15; electronic gathering Lost in Dreams September 30-October 1 at Downtown Las Vegas Events Center; Reggae Rise Up October 7-9, also at Downtown Las Vegas Events Center; the emo-rock extravaganza When We Were Young October 22, 23 and 29 at the Festival Grounds on the Strip; and the potential fall return of hip-hop juggernaut Day N Vegas and 2023 comeback of longtime local anchor Punk Rock Bowling, which took 2022 off.

One reason for Vegas’ continued emergence as a music festival hub: the times in which we’re living, says Chris Hammond, vice president of talent for AEG.

“Coming out of the pandemic, it just feels like everybody is wanting to get together, and we saw that with EDC, Life Is Beautiful and Day N Vegas last year,” he explains . “Finally, it’s 2022, and we don’t have many restrictions. There’s been a lot of planning within the past two years of getting back and launching new events.”

Besides booking lots of concerts and events up and down the Strip—including Day N Vegas, which launched in 2019—AEG famously operates Coachella and Stagecoach in Indio, California, every spring for three consecutive weekends.

A versatile location, like the expansive Empire Polo Club in the Coachella Valley or Las Vegas Motor Speedway, is an obvious necessity for fest success, but Vegas continues to dream up a variety of venues to enable this trend.

Vegoose, a destination fest created by the founders of the beloved Bonnaroo Music Festival and held at Sam Boyd Stadium from 2005-2007, couldn’t quite stick despite pleasant weather at Halloween and impressive lineups that included Rage Against the Machine, Daft Punk, Dave Matthews, Tom Petty, The Killers and the then-emerging Arcade Fire.

“It didn’t really resonate; maybe it was a little too early,” Hammond says. “Maybe those fields [around Sam Boyd Stadium] didn’t feel like a local festival, or something in Las Vegas. It could have been anywhere.”

Two major developments in 2013 set Vegas on its path as a festival hub. Life Is Beautiful made its debut, bringing sets from The Killers, Kings of Leon, Beck, Vampire Weekend and more to makeshift outdoor stages spread across several city blocks Downtown, along with art, food and other authentic programming.

Meanwhile, on the Strip, MGM Resorts opened the 15-acre Las Vegas Village across from the Luxor, which hosted iHeartRadio

that year and served as the launching pad for the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in 2014. The Village was also the precursor to the Las Vegas Festival Grounds on the north end of the Strip, initially developed for the Rock in Rio USA festival that made just one Vegas appearance, in 2015.

Hammond gives a lot of credit for the current landscape to MGM executive vice president of entertainment Chris Baldizan and LIB founder Rehan Choudhry.

“Rehan flipped it. Prior to that, everyone was looking for the biggest field they could find, and he used more creativity and [did it] in the heart of Downtown Las Vegas,” Hammond says. “Chris was the visionary behind turning that lot into a festival grounds, and that was a game-changer. Because of that, you now have a true location to hold a massive festival everybody knows about at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds.”

After hosting Route 91 for four years and other music festivals, sporting events and food festivals, the Las Vegas Village permanently shuttered after the mass shooting there on October 1, 2017. Industry observers indicate a different country music festival could return to the Strip sometime soon, perhaps at the Festival Grounds, now owned and operated by the company behind Circus Circus and Treasure Island.

Location is key, but Las Vegas also had to get a bit more hip to become the hot spot for genre-specific music festivals. Headlining residencies from the likes of Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars helped in that effort, but the success of EDC and Life Is Beautiful provided powerful impact.

“I think what makes the festival so special and unique is the setting,” says LIB CEO David Oehm. “There aren’t many events that take place in a city footprint this way, and it adds complexity and tons of intrigue.”

Oehm came on board in 2019 and helped usher the festival through its most challenging times—the onset of the pandemic and the loss of key supporter Tony Hsieh. Last year’s event, headlined by such stars as Billie Eilish, Green Day, Tame Impala and Megan Thee Stallion, was a joyous occasion, the first Vegas festival to return.

Life Is Beautiful is still considered the Vegas festival, even after this year’s announcement that Rolling Stone magazine parent company Penske Media Corporation had acquired a majority stake.

“Rolling Stone is the right partner at the right time for us, with the deep history they have rooted in music and culture, and this tremendous relationship with the whole Penske family,” Oehm says. “They realize how special the festival is and that we are excellent at producing it, and that’s not going to change.”

While that homegrown event reaches for new heights—and looks to potentially expand beyond this city—other festivals, like Miami’s Vibra Urbana and LA’s Lovers & Friends, are finding their way to Las Vegas. It’s one of the most fascinating developments in the city’s storied entertainment history, and it will be an interesting trend to watch.

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Brock Radke

Brock Radke is an award-winning writer and columnist who currently occupies the role of managing editor at Las Vegas Weekly ...

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