Vegas Music Festival ‘Life is Beautiful’ Dies

Posted on: February 12, 2025, 01:04h. 

Last updated on: February 12, 2025, 01:50h.

Corey Levitan Read More

Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Restaurants, Las Vegas Myths.

• The 2025 Life is Beautiful festival won’t be taking place in downtown Las Vegas
• Created by former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh in 2013, the festival was sold to Rolling Stone/Penske in 2022
• The festival’s website has been taken down

As we predicted last June, the 2025 “Life is Beautiful” festival promised for downtown Las Vegas last year by its new owners won’t be happening. The festival’s website has been deleted from the internet and emails aren’t being returned.

Last year’s festival — the first in which Rolling Stone magazine became the primary owner — was scaled down dramatically from its usual three days of concerts along 18 downtown East Fremont Street blocks to a single vacant lot behind the Plaza Hotel.

The audience for the sadly renamed “Big Beautiful Block Party,” which took place Sept. 27-28, 2024, was down from a high of 180K to just a reported 7,000. And that surprised no one since its lineup was a who’s-who of “who?”

A spokesperson for Penske Media Corporation, which owns Rolling Stone, recently told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that it is shopping for real estate in downtown Las Vegas on which to host 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 statement makes little sense, however, since a company that can’t keep a website afloat isn’t looking to buy expensive land that fails to generate a profit during the 363 days per year when no festival takes place on it.

More importantly, absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder for old music festivals. Other than the most famous one of all time, Woodstock, these unicorns don’t magically bounce back from death. (And that’s actually a good thing, because Woodstock should have stayed dead the both times it refused 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 explained, “as less prominent (and less expensive) talent was booked, the festival found its footing.” A controlling interest was sold to Rolling Stone/Penske in February 2022.

The final decent year of the festival will go on record as its 10th anniversary in 2023, held in its original location with headliners including Kendrick Lamar, ODESZA and The 1975.