Vegas Music Festival ‘Life is Beautiful’ Dies
As we anticipated last June, the 2025 “Life is Beautiful” festival that its new owners promised for downtown Las Vegas last year will not take place. The festival's website is no longer available online, and emails are going unanswered.
The festival from last year — the inaugural event under Rolling Stone magazine's main ownership — was significantly reduced from its typical three days of performances across 18 blocks of downtown East Fremont Street to just one empty lot behind the Plaza Hotel.
The turnout for the unfortunately rebranded “Big Beautiful Block Party,” held on September 27-28, 2024, plummeted from a peak of 180K to only an estimated 7,000. And that astonished no one, considering its lineup featured a who's-who of "who?"
A representative for Penske Media Corporation, the owner of Rolling Stone, recently informed the Las Vegas Review-Journal that they are seeking real estate in downtown Las Vegas to hold the festival.
“We’re excited to continue our legacy for the next decade and look forward to announcing our new venue and date soon.”
That assertion doesn’t hold much validity, though, because a business unable to maintain a website isn’t interested in purchasing costly land that doesn’t yield a profit for the 363 days annually when no event occurs on it.
Moreover, being absent does not increase affection for old music festivals. Aside from the most renowned event ever, Woodstock, these extraordinary entities don’t effortlessly return from demise. (And that’s genuinely positive, since Woodstock ought to have remained dead both times it declined to in the ’90s.)
Business is Painful
“Life is Beautiful” was founded by the late Tony Hsieh in 2013. And, like most downtown Las Vegas institutions the former Zappos CEO invested in at the time, it lost money. According to Casino.org‘s own Vital Vegas blogger Scott Roeben, the festival lost “about $10 million in its first three years of operation alone.”
As Roeben stated, “with less prominent (and more affordable) talent being booked, the festival established its foundation.” In February 2022, a controlling stake was sold to Rolling Stone/Penske.
The concluding impressive year of the festival will mark its 10th anniversary in 2023, taking place at its original site with main acts such as Kendrick Lamar, ODESZA, and The 1975.
