Concerts
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Heat exhaustion is the cause of death of a Brazilian fan who attended a concert of singer Taylor Swift in November, a forensics report obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday shows.
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Ana Clara Benevides, 23, passed out during Swift’s second song in the Nov. 17 concert in Rio de Janeiro, “Cruel Summer,” and died hours later at a local hospital. Temperatures in the city that day were at about 40 degrees Celsius (105 Fahrenheit).
Fans lined up for hours before the show, and many accused organizers of failing to deliver enough water supplies for the more than 60,000 attending the concert at the Nilton Santos Stadium. They said they were not allowed to take their own water into the stadium.
The report by Rio’s Forensic Medical Institute said Benevides’ heat exposure led to a cardiorrespiratory arrest. It also said she did not have preexisting conditions or substance abuse that could have led to her death.
The forensics expert who analyzed her body said in the document she had “serious compromise of her lungs and sudden death” due to the heat.
One of Benevides’ friends, who also attended the concert, told local media outlets in November they had been given water while waiting to enter the stadium.
Organizers T4F said in a statement the company “followed the best practices,” complied with “every demand from authorities” and “distributed thousands of bottles of water” to fans. TF4 also denied it did not allow people to bring their own water to the concert.
TF4 also said Benevides “was promptly cared for by members of a rescue team and sent (to the hospital) in an intensive-care unit ambulance.”
“In our 40 years in the business, this company had never registered a tragic episode” like Benevides’ death due to extreme heat, T4F said.
The office of Rio’s public prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation. Rio police said in a statement on Wednesday that after the forensics report is analyzed “representatives of the company organizing the event will be called to testify.”
Benevides’ death shook many in Brazil. She had taken her first flight to travel from the country’s center-west region to see her favorite singer.
In a statement posted on Instagram after the death, Swift said the case had left her with a “shattered heart.”
Benevides’s father, José Weiny Machado, told news website G1 he “never doubted the cause of death was the heat.”
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In February, Fred again.., Skrillex and Four Tet turned New York’s Madison Square Garden into a sweaty rave, performing a body-rattling five-hour show that had sold out in two minutes and, in some ways, set the tone for dance music in 2023. The demand proved the trio to be a perfect replacement for Frank Ocean as Coachella’s Sunday night headliner on its second weekend. And by October, Fred again.. had sold 42,300 tickets and grossed $2.9 million across a three-night residency in New York, according to Billboard Boxscore, later playing an eight-night run in Los Angeles.
“We been practising for monthssss to try n make this show a level up and to like really push ourselves to make it as musical and dynamic and LIVE as possible,” Fred again.. posted on Instagram.
Fred again.., now nominated for a best new artist Grammy, became a bigger star in 2023, but he was far from the only one cashing in on the post-pandemic return to live events. In June, future bass star Illenium played Denver’s Mile High Stadium, selling 47,300 tickets and grossing $3.9 million. Meanwhile, Beyoncé toured the globe on her dance album, Renaissance, selling 2.8 million tickets worldwide. And live electronic maestros ODESZA led the festival circuit, headlining Bonnaroo, Governors Ball and Outside Lands.
“There have been all these moments where I realized that electronic music from a live standpoint is in an incredibly healthy place,” says Lee Anderson, executive vp/managing executive at Wasserman, who represents electronic acts including Skrillex, Zedd and Disclosure. “It might be bigger than it has ever been, including the EDM boom.”
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This surge has origins in the pandemic, when dancefloors were vacant. Prior to 2020, dance shows had declined “from the late 2010s from a ticket-buying standpoint and on the live side,” Anderson says. This was the same era in which house music was replacing EDM as the mainstream dance genre of choice in the United States.
But as artists turned to livestreaming during lockdown, dance music became particularly accessible, given the ease of streaming DJ sets. The sound proliferated on Twitch and other platforms at the same time that a new generation of fans were coming of age — and when live events returned, they wanted to dance. “You had a whole new generation of kids that were like, ‘Oh, my God. What is this? I want to get out of the house and go,’ ” says Anderson.
The pent-up demand drove ticket sales at dance shows across the United States, and by 2022, Anderson says, “I was talking to people at Live Nation and AEG like, ‘The electronic stuff is selling really well.’ We looked at the data and realized this genre was heating back up.”
Contributing to the rise was the general expansion of the U.S. dance market. While there used to be roughly a dozen cities in which techno artists could play, Anderson says there are now 30. Beyond major markets like Miami, New York and Los Angeles, there are now thriving U.S. hubs for bass, commercial dance, trap, house and other styles in cities including Denver and Phoenix. (Anderson says that artists’ social engagement is the best indicator of where they’ll be able to sell tickets.) Meanwhile, festivals that were formerly booking three or four dance acts are now booking four times that many.
While the current dominance of house music has delivered greater levels of live success to veteran artists — Anderson cites Chicago legend Green Velvet as a prime example, saying he is “probably bigger than he has ever been” — fresh acts are also rising. After playing their first major shows earlier this year, San Diego bass producers ISOxo and Knock2 performed four sold-out shows at The Shrine in L.A. in November.
“Between the two of them, the highest-streamed song has about 13 million plays,” Anderson says. “These are not huge numbers, but they sold out 20,000 tickets in L.A. as fast as the cart could process transactions — and we had enough people in the queue that if the venue was available, we could have done another four [nights].”
Such residencies and one-offs are also indicative of the newly preferred style of touring for dance acts, with teams often putting on a small number of shows that feel special — and which fans are more likely to travel for — rather than grinding it out on the road. Illenium’s stadium show demonstrated the viability of this model (the act will play two more at SoFi Stadium in L.A. in February 2024), as did a set by FISHER and Chris Lake in October, when they shut down a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and drew 12,000 fans. (Anderson calls the show “one of the biggest stories in dance music this year.”) Pretty Lights’ comeback tour featured a series of short residencies, with 27 shows across nine venues. And on Dec. 16, John Summit will headline the 22,000-capacity BMO Stadium in L.A. — a type of show that Kx5 proved viable last December, when it played for 46,000 people at the L.A. Coliseum.
“When you had the [EDM bubble] era of, ‘Can it ever be that big again?,’ did you see electronic artists selling out stadiums as headline acts?” Anderson asks. “Because that’s happening today, and you’re going to see that continue happening. And that has never happened before. That’s new.”
This story originally appeared in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
NATIVELAND, the festival put on by Nigerian creative content and media company NATIVE Networks in Lagos for the past half decade, is returning for its fifth iteration on Dec. 22. This year, the fest will be headlined by rising African stars Ayra Starr, ODUMODUBLVCK, Uncle Waffles and Lancey Foux at SOL Beach on Victoria Island in Lagos.
NATIVE Networks, which comprises NATIVE magazine and NATIVE Records, launched the NATIVELAND Festival in 2016, with Burna Boy, Skepta and J Hus headlining. Since then, the festival has hosted the likes of Davido, Wizkid, Tems, Rema, Ckay, Mayorkun, Dave, Amaarae, Koffee and Naira Marley over the years, for editions in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021.
Last September, NATIVE signed a global joint venture deal with Def Jam to sign and develop African artists, becoming the first African label to strike a joint venture with the legendary hip-hop label. At the time, Def Jam chairman/CEO Tunji Balogun said, “As we build a culture here at Def Jam that connects the best in the global Black music diaspora — from hip-hop and R&B to reggae, Afrobeats and more — clearly some of the best, most vital, interesting and cutting-edge new artists and sounds in music today are coming out of the continent.”
Since then, the venture signed a deal with ODUMODUBLVCK, who has had a big year behind high-profile guest spots and his own huge hit “DECLAN RICE,” as well as Teezee, Smada and more.
In addition to the headliners, the festival will also feature Amaarae, Shallipoppi, Cruel Santino, Boj, Sarz, Bloody Civilian and Crayon, among others.