Life Is Beautiful is renewed. The long-running Las Vegas festival announced major changes for its 2024 event on Tuesday (June 25), with the event shrinking from three days to two days and moving to a new location not far from the old one in downtown Las Vegas Vegas.
While Life Is Beautiful previously took place over 18 blocks in the downtown Arts District, this year's show takes place in a smaller location on the other side of downtown's Fremont Street Experience, a five-minute walk from The Arts District .
The line-up is also more focused this year, with the September 27-28 party featuring 14 electronic acts, including LCD Soundsystem, Justice, Peggy Gou, James Blake, Jungle, Jamie xx, Neil Frances, LP Giobbi, Thundercat and Badbadnotgood. The sets will not overlap, with performances starting each evening at 5 p.m. and take place one after the other until 2 am. tickets go on sale Thursday, June 27 at 10am. PT.
This year, the festival is called Life Is Beautiful Presents: A Big Beautiful Block Party. The event is now wholly owned by Rolling Stone, which has acquired a majority stake in the 2022 festival for the first time. (Rolling rock belongs to Advertising signof the parent company, Penske Media Corporation.)
Says Rolling Stone CEO Gus Wehner Advertising sign that “for various reasons, we had to explore new locations,” but that it was “super important” for the festival to remain in downtown Las Vegas.
While the festival team considered taking a year off from the event, it instead landed on this new format, though Wenner says “our intention is to bring the thing back to full scale” in the coming years. While that three-day, multi-genre format will likely return, “this block party idea is something we could do quite a bit.”
For now, though, “it was exciting for us to put something a little more focused together that wasn't quite so multi-genre.” He says that electronic music has always been a staple of the Life Is Beautiful lineup, and that “if you look at the festival landscape, I think that's a product that should probably be around more, as opposed to these big festivals where we have huge pop music acts all playing on the festival circuit with slight permutations in different ones [events].”
Las Vegas is, of course, a historically strong market for electronic music, although A Big Beautiful Block Party “is a little different than what you find in a lot of Vegas,” says Wenner. “It's less EDM and more indie electronic — more instruments on stage, more risqué. We feel there is a market place for this lineup and not just pull the mega-DJs playing clubs on the Strip into one spot. This has a unique point of view.”
A Big Beautiful Block Party takes place on the same days at San Francisco's Portola electronic festival, which will also include performances from Justice, LP Giobbi, Empress Of, Neil Frances and Jamie xx. Wenner says “seeing how well people responded to Portola was a really good sign for us. it's something they're excited about.”
Wenner says that since participating in the festival, he's “overwhelmed with how much support there is for Life Is Beautiful in Las Vegas… I had been told that, but to meet all the players and spend time in the community and talk to the small businesses that have been in and around the festival for 10 years, it is transformative. It certainly gives us great appreciation and respect for what has been built.”
Life Is Beautiful was founded in 2013 by Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos and an entrepreneur who had a vision to transform and revitalize the downtown Las Vegas community. Hsieh died in 2020 at the age of 46. Wenner says this year's show “honors Hsieh's legacy and the legacy of Life Is Beautiful and her spirit while also evolving.”
While the festival looks different this year, the goal of A Big Beautiful Block Party is pretty much the same as it always has been.
“Bottom line,” says Wenner, “is we want to have an af-king party.”
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/life-is-beautiful-block-party-2024-las-vegas-justice-lcd-sounsystem-1235717044/