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Las Vegas Metropolitan Police are reporting two deaths that happened amid EDC Las Vegas 2025, the dance music mega-festival that happened at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway this past weekend, May 16-18. A statement provided to Billboard by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) says that “after discussions with the coroner’s office, LVMPD will be […]
Phil Pulitano was deep into an ayahuasca ceremony when he knew definitively that it was time to move on from his longtime professional post.
In 2008, Pulitano co-founded the BPM festival, a January gathering of dance industry professionals — named for “bartenders, promoters, musicians” — that over the years grew into one of the electronic scene’s premiere indie festivals. During its nine-year tenure in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, the event drew tens of thousands of fans and a perpetually strong collection of techno, minimal and house music producers and DJs.
Then in 2017, a shooting in a club adjacent to the festival left one person dead, made the threat of violence painfully real and effectively forced BPM out of town. A message spray painted in town read in Spanish that “This is to show that we are here, for not falling in line, Phillip-BPM. This is the beginning.” The message was signed by the Zetas drug cartel.
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“In 90 seconds, our lives completely changed,” says Pulitano says over Zoom from his home in Ibiza. “We went from being [on the verge of] a 50% buyout for $40 million to having to pick up one of our security guards and dear friends off the ground after he was shot.” While BPM continued its expansion plans, hosting editions in locations including Portugal and Tel Aviv, Israel and eventually finding a new permanent home in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, the 2017 attack was ultimately the first in a series of unfortunate events.
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After its 2020 debut Costa Rica edition, the 2021 festival was cancelled due to the pandemic. Then in 2022, BPM was forced to cancel 30 hours before it was set to begin due to emergency covid restrictions put in place by the government that banned large gatherings. BPM organizers got this news after roughly 7,000 people, half of the total attendees, had already arrived to town for the event. While the team was able to host several smaller, renegade parties on nearby private land, Pulitano says the situation was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” creating a financial blow that cost BPM millions.
The situation was compounded when the event’s ticketing company did not make good on its promise to refund the event’s 14,000 would be attendees, forcing Pulitano and his business partner, fellow Canadian and BPM co-founder Craig Pettigrew, to come up with the money to pay everyone back. Pulitano says his relationship with Pettigrew deteriorated under the strain. But “I couldn’t even walk away if I wanted,” he says. “My name was involved and people hadn’t received their ticket money back.”
BPM 2023 created an opportunity for the company to recoup funds and pay off debts, despite it being the smallest ever edition of the festival, hosting roughly 3,800 people. Pulitano was proud of the festival but felt the brand had lost credibility. He also knew his stress about it all was also stressing out his then pregnant wife. As the dancefloors at this 2023 edition heaved with party people, Pulitano looked on knowing it would be his last time with BPM.
He’d by then participated in a pair of ayahuasca ceremonies — an ancient Indigenous ritual during which participants drink a psychedelic brew made of boiled leaves and vine and which Pulitano refers to by the colloquial term “plant medicine” — and found certainty and inspiration in the experiences. “I needed to do my own thing,” he says. “I had these sketches. I came up with a new idea.”
Phil Pulitano
Courtesy of Phil Pulitano
That idea is The Fifth Element, a festival Pulitano is producing this January in the Puerto Rican rainforest. As with BPM, the center of the seven-day event will be techno and minimal music. But the real nexus of The Fifth Element Pulitano says, will be deep meaning, spirituality and elevated vibes.
“I knew I needed to figure out a way to create a hybrid experience in dance culture,” Pulitano says. “Not going for a super hippie vibe that plant medicine can be… but doing something that’s in service and creates a bit more awareness and brings more consciousness to what we’re doing.”
In practical terms, this will involve bringing a crowd of roughly 4,000 attendees and 60 or so artists to the currently undisclosed site in the Puerto Rican rainforest. (This site has some infrastructure including a restaurant and ATV and horseback riding facilities, and while in nature, is not in a particularly dense or remote area of the rainforest.) Puerto Rico is in fact where BPM had hoped to relocate to in 2018, although these plans were set aside when a devastating hurricane hit the island in August of that year. With rainforests being sensitive ecosystems, Pulitano says The Fifth Element will be strictly leave no trace and also provide opportunities to participate in beach cleanups.
Pulitano says the goal is to book artists who “want to come and experience something more as well, not just come in out and just and make money and leave.” Set times for the event’s two stages will not be publicly announced. “Your journey starts when you arrive,” says Pulitano.
Programming will also include yoga, culinary experiences, art and ritual. (Pulitano advises that The Fifth Element “is not a plant medicine event, but it is a consciousness event.”) His staff of nine even includes shaman to advise on spiritual concerns. He foresees rituals like smudging happening on the dancefloor, and altogether hopes to create an experience with greater depth and purpose than escapist partying and revenue. The seven days will be structured with an “opening ceremony ritual” at the beginning before gradually ramping up the music, and then winding down into ritual in the latter part of the week.
The Fifth Element is being marketed towards socially conscious, experience hungry, wellness driven and reasonably well-moneyed attendees looking for bespoke experiences hat are more unique than most large-scale corporate events. (Funding for The Fifth Element is coming from a private investor.)
Altogether, he says the event “is something that’s giving me the same feeling I had when we created BPM back in 2008 and that [we had] in Mexico.” (He now refers to Pettigrew as his “ex partner,” says the two are not speaking and that his agreement to be bought out of BPM is currently “in a court situation.” He adds that the BPM brand was “destroyed” after the 2025 event was cancelled last minute due to permitting issues. The festival has to date not announced plans for a 2026 edition.)
But with his ceremonial visions now taking material form, Pulitano says he’s again feeling a passion that he personally partially lost after the 2017 shooting. It’s a concept he hopes will inject some heart into the dance world at large.
“I think that the scene has become this crazy bubble where the fees are too high for artists, which then ultimately fall back on the promoter, then the then the ticket buyer,” he says. “I feel like it’s losing its essence this way. There’s really no soul behind it. What we’re trying to create is something with soul and love and unity, that’s trying to find purpose within the chaos.”
Calvin Harris has responded to accusations of plagiarism by veteran trance producer Chicane. In a video posted to Instagram last week with the caption “copyright alert,” Chicane sat at his computer and explained why he believes that Harris’ most recent single, “Blessings,” shares similarities with his 1996 song “Offshore,” playing each track and comparing them. […]
This week in dance music: DJ Snake graced the cover of Billboard France ahead of his giant stadium show in Paris last weekend. “With all humility, I don’t claim to represent France,” the producer said in the story. “I represent a guy from Paris, who’s Franco-Algerian, and I just try my best to do interesting […]
EDC Las Vegas starts Friday (May 16) at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The three-day dance mega-festival will feature sets from more than 250 artists, with many of them being blasted out of Vegas and onto the internet via the festival’s free livestream.
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Fans can thusly enjoy EDC from the comfort of their couch by tuning into either Insomniac TV or the Insomniac YouTube page. Live coverage begins at 6:45 p.m. PT/ 9:45 p.m. ET daily, with the broadcast going all night and into the dawn Friday, Saturday (May 17) and Sunday (May 18).
The livestream will feature coverage from five of Insomniac’s nine stages — KineticField, CosmicMeadow, CircuitGrounds, NeonGarden and BassPod, with Insomniac TV dedicating a separate channel to each stage.
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While the exact coverage schedule isn’t known, the festival overall will feature performances from artists including Dom Dolla, Alesso, Afrojack, Alison Wonderland playing b2b with Kaskade, Illenium playing b2b with Slander, Sara Landry, Horsegiirl, Gesaffelstein, RL Grime, Martin Garrix, DJ Snake, Interplanetary Criminal, Rezz, Fisher, Eric Prydz and many, many more.
Produced by Insomniac Events, EDC Las Vegas is the biggest dance music festival in North America, welcoming more than 540,000 attendees over its three days. Myriad versions of EDC also take place around the world in countries including Mexico, Brazil, the U.K., China, India and South Korea.
Earlier this week, Insomniac announced that a new edition of EDC will happen in Medellín, Colombia, in October. The show will be produced in partnership with Colombian events company Páramo Presenta.
It was an understandably sensitive process for Carl Falk to complete the work on “Let’s Ride Away,” a previously unreleased Avicii track that’s officially out today (May 15) and comes seven years after the Swedish producer’s death at age 28.
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Falk, who was a frequent Avicii collaborator during the artist’s lifetime and who also helped complete some of the music for the 2019 posthumous album Tim, says that when he originally received the music for “Let’s Ride Away,” the experience was like being thrust back in time.
“It’s almost like you open someone’s drawer of clothes who’s not there anymore, and you look at the T-shirt like, ‘Oh, remember this old thing?’” Falk tells Billboard over Zoom from his home studio in Stockholm. “It’s kind of the same opening a song like this, because there were so many elements in it that were like, ‘Oh, the way he colored his piano chords, or the way that pick bass plays. It’s so simple, but so good.’ I was just listening and enjoying it for a second, like ‘I miss this; I miss this style of music; I miss making it, and I miss the blend of of organic and electronic elements.’ It was like a memory coming back.”
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“Let’s Ride Away” is defined by this collision of past and present. The track was originally written in Nashville circa 2017 by Avicii and Kacey Musgraves, along with prolific country songwriter Luke Laird, who’s penned music for a laundry list of greats, including Eric Church and Carrie Underwood.
“New [writing sessions], you just never know how they’re going to go,” Laird says in a video accompanying the song’s release. “I got in there and [Tim] couldn’t have been more welcoming and warm. Honestly it was very similar to a normal Nashville songwriting session. Sat down, started with the guitars, and then he just started doing his thing.”
The artist born Tim Bergling eventually layered up the song with a kickdrum and other electronic elements, Musgraves recorded the vocals and the trio named the track “Ride Away.” The song, however, was never released, although versions of it have leaked onto the internet over the years.
Now called “Let’s Ride Away,” the song is officially out of the vault and part of Avicii Forever, a new compilation that features many of the artist’s biggest hits, like “Levels” and “Wake Me Up,” with “Let’s Ride Away” being the project’s only previously unreleased track. (While a handful of Avicii remixes have been released since his death, “Let’s Ride Away” is the first original song to come out since Tim.)
Falk says Johnny Tennander of Sony Music Publishing Scandinavia reached out to him in October of 2024 to ask if he would complete the track. “[Johnny] said ‘Hey, no one knows this yet, but we’re going to do a best of album, and I think we found a song that could potentially be super good,’” Falk recalls. “‘He said, ‘I’m not going to jinx it or anything, but do you mind coming up to my office, just to to hear it?’”
Falk went to the office, where Tennander played him two versions of “Ride Away”, one at at a BPM familiar to the Avicii wheelhouse and another at a slower tempo. “One thing I instantly felt,” Falk says, “was the typical Tim thing of introducing a new instrument into his palette of sounds. I can tell by hearing the pedal steel that this is Tim for the first time trying out a new instrument, to try to make it an Avicii instrument.”
Given that Musgraves had bowed out of the song, there was also the task of finding a new vocalist. The team eventually landing on Elle King. In early 2025, Falk worked with King over Zoom while she was in the studio with another frequent Avicii collaborator, Albin Nedler. “Tim was really particular with his melodies,” says Falk, “and also when I listen to Kacey’s vocals, she had a specific style of singing — so I really wanted Elle to sing it in her own way, but also be respectful of the melody.”
King was keen to get it right. As Falk recalls, she was like, “‘Okay, whatever you need. One more take. One more take. One more take. I’m gonna try this, and I’m gonna go for this note.’ It was a really easy, fun process and such a relief to to hear like, ‘She gets the song.’ You don’t have to really transform it into something else. You just have to get it recorded, and it will be great.”
On the production front, Falk says he was given “a couple of different demo versions of the song, and they were slightly different. That was easy to hear, because I asked for all the files from anything I could get, to really dig in and listen to what exactly was in there.” He says a couple of elements were hidden low in the mix, with his completion work bringing them more to the fore.
“It was quite obvious what we should do,” he says. “It was more fixing and touching up. The whole idea was already there. For me, that’s the big challenge and big responsibility, to finish something. It was the same with the Tim album, where it’s like a guessing game, because usually you’re two people sitting in the same room.”
To aid the process, Falk opened a computer file in which he keeps roughly four dozen signature production elements Bergling used in his work: kick drums, bass drums, transitional sound effects and more. “I’m not going to use these sounds for anything else ever,” Falk says. “But in this case, they got used one last time.” He also returned to songs like 2015’s “Broken Arrows” and “Sunset Jesus” that he and Bergling worked on together, to recall how they’d made certain sounds. (Falk also has songwriting credits on songs including One Direction‘s “What Makes You Beautiful” and Nicki Minaj‘s “Starships.)”
Of course, finishing the work of your deceased friend and collaborator is both technically and emotionally delicate work. Falk says that compared to doing the work for Tim less than a year after Bergling died on April 20, 2018, he was more emotionally prepared this time, adding that the process “gave me a bit more confidence that this song is too good not to be heard.”
Many fans are celebrating the release of new Avicii music, and there are also critics who argue it would be better to cease new Avicii projects — which over the years have included the release of Tim, the opening of the Avicii museum in Stockholm, a photo book, a biography and a documentary released this past December. (In 2022, Swedish entertainment company Pophouse acquired 75% of the recording and publishing catalog, with the other 25% remaining with the Bergling family.)
But Falk says the opportunity in “Let’s Ride Away” is in how it meaningfully expands the Avicii repertoire. “It doesn’t sound like you’re just releasing something that sounds like 10 other things he’s done,” he says. Falk adds that his teenage children are just now getting into Avicii, and that he believes “Ride Away” and the Avicii Forever project are ways for new fans to potentially discover the late artist, his sound and his substantial catalog.
I suggest that there are few people who could do justice to the song better and more respectfully than someone who knew and worked with Avicii so closely while he was alive.
“I hope that’s the case,” says Falk. “It’s surely the case for for me, and my reason for doing it was exactly that.”
What began in 2014 as a beautiful Instagram moment in the Mojave Desert with thousands of biodegradable lanterns launching in unison in the night sky will this year transform into a full-scale music festival with major acts.
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Taking place Oct. 3-5, Rise Festival will feature headliners Rüfüs du Sol on Friday, Calvin Harris on Saturday and John Mayer on Sunday. Other artists on the bill include Ben Böhmer, Coco & Breezy, Goose and LP Giobbi.
Rise Festival will happen at the Jean Dry Lake Bed about 40 minutes southwest of Las Vegas. Organizers expect around 20,000 people per day at the event, which brands itself as “the world’s largest sky lantern festival.” Ticket packages go on sale Friday (May 16) via the festival’s website.
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The independently produced and promoted festival took a break in 2024 and in 2025 hired a new CEO, David Oehm, who previously worked with Las Vegas festival Life Is Beautiful and who laid plans for a significant expansion.
Joining Oehm is Rise president and COO Ashley Goodhue-White, who was also part of Life Is Beautiful in its early years and who later left to pursue her own production company. In 2015, Rise was one of her first clients. She rejoined the festival this year after a stint with Las Vegas Grand Prix. In 2024, Rise was acquired by NobleLight Foundation, a nonprofit that supports entrepreneurs focused on positive socioeconomic and environmental change, and converted into a nonprofit charitable event meant to “bring more light into the world.”
“Each night has a unique musical point of view,” Oehm says. “We wanted to find acts aligned with our brand ethos and overall identity: joyful, elevating, cinematic, atmospheric, emotional. Our headliners and everyone else down the lineup reflect that. Every artist we’ve spoken with has been surprised by the concept — there is nothing like it — and seeing visuals where we’ve got thousands of sky lanterns [launching in unison].”
Their work assembling the lineup results in 17 artists across electronic, indie, folk and experimental genres, and a new site footprint encompassing three experiences. The Path, a desert lounge with seating meant to be a transition space, weaves within an open art gallery. It’s a space to chill, meditate and appreciate the scenery.
“Rise is not just another music festival,” says Goodhue-White. “There’s so much powerful meaning behind it, and it is a space for everyone. We want people to get out of their cars, stop scrolling on their phones and be immersed — take in the desert around them.”
The Compass hosts the sky lantern release twice per night. Here, “there are 6,500 torches, perfectly spaced, surrounded by food and beverage options,” Goodhue-White says. When festivalgoers arrive, they get a kit with a cushion, an instruction card, a pen and two lanterns. When ready, they pick out the torch they want — closer to the stage or farther away. Most people personalize their lanterns with messages. Then the staff lights the torches and everyone releases lanterns at the same time.
“After a few acts perform on The Compass stage, the lanterns are released and we refer to that as the ‘world’s largest collaborative art installation.’ People are releasing their hopes and their dreams. You sit there with thousands of other people and have a moment together,” she says.
Then, guests go from The Compass to the new Horizon Stage, where the headliners and other acts perform. Gates open daily at 3 p.m., and Rise wraps up by midnight.
“Rise has always been the largest event at the Lake Bed,” Goodhue-White says. “We work closely with the Bureau of Land Management, Metro and Clark County Fire. We partner with Leave No Trace and leave the area better than we found it every year — everything we bring, we remove.”
See the complete lineup below.
Rise Festival
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Charli xcx is a party of one in her new music video for “Party 4 U,” which finds the star revisiting a fan-favorite track from 2020 while spending a day by herself in the middle of nowhere before things get wildly out of control. In the visual released Thursday (May 15) — the five-year anniversary […]
Assembling a show for the technological mecca that is Las Vegas’ Sphere is a head-spinning process for any artist and their team. But CAA agent Ferry Rais-Shaghaghi and Sphere Entertainment vp of live Erin Calhoun worked side by side to help create the buzzy, boundary-pushing run by melodic techno artist Anyma, who became the first electronic act to play the venue when he kicked off a residency there in late December that ran through early March.
Booking an electronic artist had been a priority, particularly given that the right artist would, Calhoun says, “be able to leverage all of Sphere’s experiential technologies in a new, compelling way.” Anyma (born Matteo Milleri) had been on the Sphere team’s radar for years, and over time, it became clear that his international appeal, futuristic music and strong preexisting visual identity made the Italian American artist the perfect choice.
Rais-Shaghaghi says that for him and the rest of Anyma’s team, Calhoun became “the point person for us to navigate everything.” In the year or so it took to produce the show — titled Afterlife Presents Anyma ‘The End of Genesys’ — Calhoun and Rais-Shaghaghi formed, he says, “an incredible business relationship that became a friendship with someone we trusted and felt comfortable going to and having the difficult conversations we needed to have.”
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Through these conversations, the team created huge and viral moments, like the scene where a character falls through space, creating a wild, lightly dizzying effect for the audience. They also made a pair of cello-playing robots that helped bring Anyma’s melodies to life. Calhoun says such elements “highlighted the way technology combines with artistry to make for an unforgettable experience.” Milleri developed the visual feast of a show himself alongside Anyma’s longtime visual creative director/lead computer graphics artist Alessio De Vecchi and head creative Alexander Wessely.
Rais-Shaghaghi and his team leveraged their network and hype around the residency to book support acts — “We looked at them more as guests,” he says — for the run that included Peggy Gou, John Summit, Solomun, Amelie Lens, Charlotte de Witte and Tiësto, giving each night a mini-festival feel.
And when issues inevitably arose during production, Rais-Shaghaghi says Calhoun “would always help us in navigating it within her ecosystem and [figuring out] how we could get to the finish line. Erin is firm, but she knows how to get the results she needs without burning bridges. She’s also really good at being a team player, understanding the artist’s creative process and direction and being the voice between the artist and the owner of [Madison Square Garden] in finding that middle ground.”
“We were completely aligned on the overall goal here: to blow everyone away with stunning visuals, next-level sound and an unparalleled live experience,” Calhoun adds. “Every move we made was side by side, which is how we approach every artist playing our venue. The vision is led by the artist, and we do everything we can to make it happen. Ferry is so passionate and was hands-on throughout the entirety of the run.”
This shared mission was ultimately a huge success, with the 12-night residency drawing more than 200,000 fans from around the world. The first eight dates alone sold 137,000 tickets and grossed $21 million, although Rais-Shaghaghi says money is ultimately beside the point.
“Obviously, as agents, we have to look at how we make our clients win financially,” he says, “but more so, it’s about how we can do things where the promoter wins, the fans win and the artists feel that they created an experience that had a high impact.”
This show is clearly one such instance. “From the performers onstage to the fans in the crowd,” Calhoun says, “everyone wanted more, more, more.”
This story appears in the May 17, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Charli xcx is ready to throw a party 4 her fourth studio album, How I’m Feeling Now, which celebrates its fifth birthday Thursday (May 15) amid the viral resurgence of one of its tracks — for which the musician has announced a new music video.
In a heartfelt handwritten letter posted to Instagram Wednesday (May 14), the pop star first opened up about crafting her 2020 LP, the release of which she wrote “honestly just feels like yesterday.” “So much has changed since then: me, my life, elements of my music and most definitely the world,” Charli wrote.
“I made the album in just five weeks, from conception to release, entirely publicly in collaboration with all of you,” she continued of crafting the album at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was so special. I felt like I rediscovered myself, my sanity + my sense of connection with the world, at a time where we were all so alone.”
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Though far from her most commercially successful, How I’m Feeling Now is one of Charli’s most beloved works among her fanbase. Released four years before she’d experience a career breakthrough with 2024 year-defining album Brat, the LP peaked at No. 111 on the Billboard 200.
In recent months, however, the album has undergone a renaissance thanks to one of its tracks in particular: “party 4 u,” which made its Billboard Hot 100 in early May a full five years after its release after going viral on TikTok. On the chart dated May 17, 2025, it reached a new peak at No. 55.
With the well-timed retroactive success of “party 4 u,” Charli went on to announce Wednesday that she has a music video in the works for the half-decade-old track. Sharing a seconds-long closeup of her eyes paired with a snippet of the song, she wrote on her social media accounts, “5 years later… the party 4 u video. tomorrow.”
The news comes shortly after she shared a clip of herself running down an empty street while holding a bushel of pink balloons — a direct reference to one of the song’s lyrics — on TikTok. And in her handwritten note, the Essex-born star had hinted, “I really can’t believe that 5 years later one of the Angel favorites is having its own special moment.”
“So obviously I wanted to do something to celebrate…,” she’d continued. “This one’s for you Angels.”
The How I’m Feeling Now anniversary comes just a few weeks after Charli performed at Coachella 2025, incorporating “party 4 u” into her Weekend 2 setlist. The weekend prior, she brought Lorde, Troye Sivan and Billie Eilish on stage with her to perform their respective Brat remix collaborations: “Girl, So Confusing,” “Talk Talk” and “Guess.”
Charli is now fresh off of four nights at Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., on her own headlining Brat Tour. She’ll next embark on a European leg starting May 31 in Poland.
See her post about How I’m Feeling Now‘s anniversary below.