Live Nation Entertainment is bringing back Atlanta’s Music Midtown after canceling the festival last fall.
The lineup this year features a wide variety of pop, rock, electronic and hip-hop acts. Headliners include veteran pop singer Pink, brooding singer-songwriter Billie Eilish, classic rock band Guns N’ Roses and Atlanta hip-hop artist Lil Baby as headliners from Sept. 15-17 at Piedmont Park.
Guns N’ Roses, who became one of the biggest rock bands of the late 1980s with hits like “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Patience,” is an act catering to a slightly older crowd than what Music Midtown has been chasing in recent years. The band has not performed in Atlanta since the Georgia Dome in 2016.
Pink, who has hits spanning more than two decades, last appeared in Atlanta at State Farm Arena in 2019. Eilish’s most recent Atlanta appearance was also at State Farm Arena in early 2022 and she previously performed at Music Midtown in 2019. And Lil Baby headlined the arena this past January.
Other acts on the lineup include Australian DJ Flume, English pop-rock band The 1975, American rock band Incubus, Swedish singer-songwriter Tove Lo, Floridian rapper Pitbull, Jared Leto’s band 30 Seconds to Mars, and Irish singer-songwriter and former One Direction star Niall Horan.
Credit: LIVE NATION
Credit: LIVE NATION
Live Nation has returned the festival to three days, up from two in recent years, with about 40 acts in total.
Fans can sign up now for the pre-sale featuring three-day tickets and a limited number of one-day tickets at four different levels for the first time beginning at 10 a.m. Thursday, May 18, at musicmidtown.com. One-day passes start at $200 (with fees and taxes included) and $350 for three-day passes. Any remaining tickets will go on sale to the general public following the presale.
In recent years, the festival has accommodated at least 50,000 people per day.
Since Music Midtown launched in 1994, it has drawn tens of thousands each year to see major acts such as Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, Eminem, Van Halen, Post Malone, Bruno Mars and Miley Cyrus.
This year’s lineup is arguably stronger than the original 2022 Music Midtown lineup, which included Fall Out Boy, Future, My Chemical Romance and Jack White.
Live Nation nixed that festival without explanation a little more than six weeks before it was scheduled to happen. The festival’s social media account in early August 2022 said the two-day event was canned due to “circumstances beyond our control.” Long-time Live Nation Atlanta chief Peter Conlon declined to comment Monday night.
Last year, multiple officials familiar with the cancellation told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the 2022 cancellation happened in part over the ongoing legal fallout of a permissive gun expansion that was signed into law in 2014.
That 2014 state law passed by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed by then-Gov. Nathan Deal allowed Georgians to legally carry firearms in a range of new places, including public land such as city-owned Piedmont Park.
For years, there was no legal consensus on whether that law applied to private events held on public property. But a 2019 Georgia Supreme Court ruling — and an appellate court ruling in early 2022 upholding that decision — made it more difficult for private groups to restrict guns from short-term events held on public land.
The event’s organizers were concerned about a threat of a lawsuit from gun owners if they decided to hold the festival with firearms restrictions in place, two officials with direct knowledge of the decision told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last August.
Music Midtown has not yet released its firearms policy, though in the past, guns have been strictly prohibited on festival grounds and metal detectors were regularly used.
Nobody has yet legally challenged a music festival held on public property in Atlanta that has banned guns.
The popular Shaky Knees Festival earlier this month at Atlanta’s publicly owned Central Park specifically banned all weapons, according to its website policies. Same with the upcoming ONE MusicFest at Piedmont Park in October, which also prohibits “weapons of any kind.”
The new Re:SET Festival, which features acts like boygenius, Steve Lacy and LCD Soundsystem and set at Central Park, isn’t so explicit. On its website, there is a long list of prohibited items including selfie sticks, squirt guns, flags, drones, coolers, fireworks, costume masks, skateboards and food but firearms are not listed on either the “allowed” or “prohibited” list.
