Two Fests To Pack Las Vegas This Weekend

Even in what’s often touted as the Entertainment Capital of the World, this could be a magic 100 for the record books: 45 acts billed between two music festivals on Friday, and 55 more on Saturday, reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

For the past three years, Las Vegas downtown’s Life is Beautiful festival managed to land on a different weekend than the iHeartRadio Music Festival on the Strip.

But this year, organizers of both are crossing their fingers for fine weather Saturday, even if the competition is less direct than it might seem. Life is Beautiful sells close to half its 100,000-plus tickets in the Las Vegas market. And you’re either there or you miss it — unless you submit to some jittery dude’s phone-cam on YouTube.

iHeartRadio will fill the T-Mobile Arena on Friday and Saturday for the likes of U2, Drake, Sting and Usher. But millions more outside Las Vegas will be watching it via live streaming on CWTV.com and The CW app, or listening on 150 radio stations or the iHeartRadio app, which the festival was created to promote six years ago.

The biggest overlap with Life is Beautiful comes with iHeartRadio’s Daytime Village on Saturday, on the MGM Resorts Village festival site across the Strip from Luxor. As many as 25,000 people will check out 16 genre-spanning acts, from Cage The Elephant to Troye Sivan to Las Vegas-born closer Panic! At the Disco.

“It’s the first time it sold out this far in advance,” Tom Poleman, iHeartMedia’s chief programming executive, says of the Daytime Village’s third year. “I think that people caught on to how amazing that experience is unto itself. The prices are really affordable (tickets started at $49) and the lineup is incredible.”

John Sykes, president of iHeartMedia’s Entertainment Enterprises, says “anything is on the table” when it comes to the iHeartRadio weekend growing still more down the road.

Las Vegas “gives us that ability to be flexible,” he added of the venue capacity in the resort corridor. “In certain cities like New York, the geography would block you.”

Each night’s performances have been known to hit the five-hour mark but are also edited into a pair of two-hour highlights shows airing Oct. 6 and 7 on The CW.