Dance
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Over the last three years, Odesza‘s The Last Goodbye Tour has spanned 54 shows at 48 venues throughout North America, including headlining sets at festivals like Governor’s Ball and Bonnaroo.
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Tomorrow marks the beginning of its end. From July 4-6, Odesza will play the three finale shows of The Last Goodbye run at The Gorge Amphitheatre, the iconic venue roughly 150 miles southeast from the duo’s hometown of Seattle. 66,000 fans are expected over the three nights, and if things go according to plan, almost all of them will pass through an on-site installation the band has created as a tangible, extraordinary and this time truly final goodbye.
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Called Echoes, the installation is built from six 30-foot towers, 120 LED screens and loads of cutting-edge tech that will involve projection mapping and, naturally, sound. Made of brushed aluminum so the installation reflects sunlight by day, after dark Echoes comes to life with video content incorporating brand new visual content from the band, the epic three-year tour and which is also, says the project’s head of creative Steve Bramucci, “in part inspired by the fans.”
This eight-minute video loop will be synced with sound mixed by Odesza’s Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight. Known for the meticulous attention to detail they bring to their music and all elements of the Odesza universe, the pair have also been heavily involved in the design and execution of Echoes.
Their 10-minute soundscape is built from gentle ambient music mixed with voice notes left for the band by fans about what the Last Goodbye era has meant to them, with people offering comments reflecting on things like how they never felt comfortable dancing in public until seeing the show, how the music helped them deal with the loss of parents, grandparents, best friends and relationships, how attending shows expanded their friend group and how this chapter of Odesza generally contributed joy to their lives.
It’s a soundtrack with the power to make one tear up while listening to it at their office desk, and it’s thus likely to have high emotional impact when experienced by fans onsite at The Gorge. (For fans who can’t make it The Gorge, the final show on July 6 will be livestreamed on Veeps.)
The project is designed “to be experienced in the ramping-up period before a show or ramping down after a show,” says Bramucci, “but you can tell that Odesza is thinking people are going sit in here for a few minutes. They’re not just gonna race through, take a couple Instagrams and bounce.” Given crowd flow at The Gorge, Bramucci expects “97 to 98%” of attendees will pass through Echoes. (Another 3% will enter through the VIP area that doesn’t lead past the installation.)
The hope is that fans will indeed spend some time in a project that a global team has dedicated the last two months of their lives to creating. Echoes takes influence from a design originally built in Russia by Russian creative studio Setup, with a second creative studio, The Vessel, expanding on that design and project managing Echoes in the States. The Vessel’s operator Jenny Feterovich serves as Echoes’ creative director.
Meanwhile, Bramucci’s team at Uproxx was tasked with user experience, coordination and storytelling around the project, with a host of other companies involved with AV and scenic building. A 30-person crew has been on site since June 30, working around the clock to get Echoes up and functioning by the time doors open tomorrow at 5:00 p.m.
Echoes being built this week at The Gorge Amphitheatre
This challenge has been compounded by the logistics of working at The Gorge. “It’s literally in the middle of nowhere,” says The Vessel’s co-founder Jenny Feterovich. “We have to truck everything that’s going there, and there is no room for error, because you can’t run back to an office that’s three hours away to go get something. Preparation here is of utmost importance.”
The other major challenge is the weather — with the build teams preparing for possible high winds and assured heat, with temperatures during the build in the mid-80s and temperatures on show days forecasted to hit the 90s, and Saturday expected to reach 100 degrees.
Echoes was designed on PCs equipped with Snapdragon, a microchip from Qualcomm that uses predictive AI to anticipate a user’s movements, in order to shut down and reignite programs and save battery life. On-site, Snapdragon-powered PCs will be used to projection-map, troubleshoot and modify designs in real time, with the team also running visual and audio elements with Snapdragon PCs. Qualcomm also subsidized the project, with the hard costs totaling in the high six figures.
“We’ve found that there are a lot of synergies between Snapdragon technology and this genre of music,” says Qualcomm CEO Don McGuire. “EDM artists embrace innovation and are open to experimenting with technology and new tools, making them great partners.”
Ultimately though, all of the tech is intended to elicit an exclusively human response.
“If I see the face of even one fan who has a serious emotional connection to it, who’s like, ‘the aperture of my appreciation for music and what it means to connect to music has shifted because of this installation, then that’s the perfect win,” says Bramucci.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor‘s 2001 disco pop anthem “Murder On the Dancefloor” has experienced a massive renaissance after its use in last November’s film Saltburn gave new life to the song. The momentum — which has seen Bextor performing the giddy hit at events around the world — kept going in a big way over the weekend […]
Diplo is speaking out after being accused of violating “revenge porn” laws.
The 45-year-old DJ and producer, whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz, took to social media on Friday (June 28) to address a civil lawsuit accusing him of sharing sexually-explicit videos and images of a former romantic partner without her permission.
“Don’t believe what you read in the news,” Diplo wrote on Instagram alongside a carousel of images and videos of himself. “I don’t own a 100 million dollar mansion, I didn’t pay 450k euros to rave in Ibiza and I didn’t send dirty snapchats in 2017.”
He added, “Let’s talk about how lucky I am to party with you guys and how good the raves are here in Europe .. (Athens Croatia Prague done .. París up next).”
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In a complaint filed Thursday (June 27) in Los Angeles federal court, an unnamed Jane Doe accuser claimed the DJ/producer recorded their sexual encounters and shared the materials with others on Snapchat “without plaintiff’s knowledge or consent.”
In her complaint, the woman claims she had consensual sexual relationship with Diplo from 2016 to 2023. During that time, she says she occasionally “gave defendant Diplo permission to record them having sex, but never gave him permission to distribute those images and videos to third parties and reiterated that he was not to record them without her explicit consent.”
In a statement on Friday, Diplo’s attorney Bryan Freedman strongly denied the new allegations by referencing previous lawsuits claiming abuse by the artist.
“In every case where there has been an allegation of improper conduct made against Wes, the result has been either an immediate dismissal of a bogus lawsuit coupled with an apology, a court-ordered award for Wes in excess of $1.2 million, or the slow demise of an obvious shakedown attempt that has gone absolutely nowhere,” Freedman said.
“Time and again, Wes has been targeted by a group of untrustworthy individuals and their unscrupulous lawyers, cobbling together falsehoods in search of a meritless payday. This suit seems to be just more of the same, which is why we have no reason to believe that this will end any differently than all the others.”
See Diplo’s response on Instagram here.
This week in dance music: A new album by Sophie, overseen by the late producer’s brother, is coming in September. Kygo, the human music producer, met a terminally ill dog also named Kygo at the former Kygo’s Palm Tree Music Festival in the Hamptons. Las Vegas’ Life Is Beautiful announced a new name, a new format and a September lineup with LCD Soundystem, Peggy Gou and Justice. We took a look at how the the Grammys’ new rule tweaks affect the dance/electronic categories and why DJs are playing so many dance covers. Deadmau5 expressed his displeasure over recent comments by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, Diplo was hit with a new “revenge porn” lawsuit and ADE 2024 added execs from Empire, Spotify, SoundCloud and more to the program for its event this October.
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And last but never least, these are the best new dance tracks of the week.
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Channel Tres, Head Rush
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“The new music I’m making now is just on another level,” Channel Tres told Billboard last year about the output that would become his debut album. And in fact, he was right — with the release of his Head Rush project demonstrating all the inventiveness and easy cool we’ve come to know, love and respect about the Los Angeles-based artist since he broke through circa 2018. Deftly folding in influences from gospel (“Joyful Noise”) to funk (“Candy Paint”) to industrial (“Berghain”), the 17-track album feels like Channel Tres throughout, and features a cool kid assemblage of collaborators including Toro y Moi, Ty Dolla $ign, Estelle, Ravyn Lenae, Thundercat, Teezo Touchdown and Barney Bones.
Out through RCA Records, it comes ahead of summer/fall festival performances at events including HARD Summer, Outside Lands, All Points East and III Points. “A lot of emotion went into this one,” Tres wrote about the LP release. “From it being my first album and then fighting the feelings of imposter syndrome. We here, I’m with you, ill be dancing on tour soon much love.”
LP Giobbi, “Bittersweet”
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LP Giobbi’s latest release “Bittersweet” is as it sounds, with the brightness of the vocals (sung by Portugal. The Man’s John Gourley) met with a current of melancholy played out in the simultaneously lush-yet-restrained production. Combined the track gives the feeling of dancing through the tears — especially following the key change in the track’s jammy final third. “Bittersweet” is the first taste of Giobbi’s just-announced second album Dotr, coming this October via Ninja Tune, and written through (and about) the waves of grief the producer experienced after the loss of her mother in law, her longtime piano teacher and a close family friend. Named for the way the producer used sign notes to her parents, Dotr will feature collabs with Brittany Howard, Danielle Ponder, Panama and more artists.
“This album is a lot about what it is to be a daughter, have a daughter and love a daughter, as well as a way of honoring some of the most important women in my life,” the producer says in a statement. “There are also a lot of themes tied to home (the ones we create or the ones we were born into) which, for me, are reflected through my identity as a daughter.”
Isoknock & RL Grime, “Smack Talk”
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It makes perfect sense for bass Jedi RL Grime to collaborate with genre phenoms Knock2 and Isoxo (working here together as Isoknock) with their long-awaited collab “Smack Talk” also being perfectly executed and predictably large. Together, the three SoCal-based artists raise an army of sound, with hip-hop influences, a church choir, air horns and straightforward headbanding drops altogether taking shape into the heavy, cinematic style that’s generating so much excitement around Isoxo and Knock2, and which has defined much of Grimes’ catalog.
Tycho, “Phantom”
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Low-key legend Tycho returns with the lead single from the forthcoming Infinite Health, the oufit’s sixth studio album. “Phantom” gives ’80s synth pop filtered through a lens of AM radio, hitting the clean, cerebral vibe that’s defined so much of Tycho’s work, but with a slightly darker edge.
“I wanted ‘Phantom’ to feel like a blend of lights in a nightclub with some unknown entity; a moving and shifting intelligence that served as a conduit to a deeper understanding of what’s beneath the surface of existence,” says Tycho leader Scott Hansen. “It’s also about coming to terms with mortality, with the phantom being the ever-present specter. I spent more hours on this song than any other on the record.” Coming August 30 via Mom+Pop, Infinite Health will see the first North American tour from Tycho in five years.
Folamour, “Pressure Makes Diamonds”
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On the tenth anniversary of the project, French producer Folamour offers a treatise about the challenges of a career in music, with the song’s title also functioning as its thesis statement. “Pressure Makes Diamonds” is cut from the same sonic cloth as previous tracks like “Poundland Anthem,” with the track made from layers and layers of bright synth, piano stabs, a swell of percussion and the artist’s own vocals, purred with a thick French accent.
Four months out from its October conference in Amsterdam, ADE is adding a new batch of names to the program.
Today (June 27), ADE announced the addition of Empire president Tina Davis, who will give a keynote question and answer session about her role in expanding the influence of Empire, with a focus on the independent label’s expansion into Afrobeats and Latin.
Amid the explosion of music from the region, Spotify’s head of music for Sub-Saharan Africa Phiona Okumu will talk about elevating African artists and Spotify’s initiatives to support emerging and female artists. Grimes’ manager Daouda Leonard will give a talk looking at the intersection of music, AI and technology, along with artist management and ways to give artists control over their careers and businesses.
Believe’s global head of music Romain Vivien and TuneCore CEO Andreea Gleeson will give a joint keynote address as part of ADE’s Insider Knowledge series that will focus on how artists can navigate the evolving music landscape. Additionally, as part of a new partnership between SoundCloud and ADE, leaders from the platform will present a session on how independent artists can make the most of it.
Along with these execs, electronic artists including Palestinian techno producer Sama’ Abdulhadi, Ukrainian artist Miss Monique and Dutch producer Chris Stussy all join the program. Previously announced speakers include Timbaland, Martin Garrix, Laurent Garnier, music executive Grace Ladoja and representatives from fabric London, Armada Music, WME and UTA, with more names to be announced in the coming months.
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ADE 2024 is taking place Oct. 16-20 at locations throughout Amsterdam. The conference will again be divided into Lab and Pro programming, with Lab content tailored for people trying to get into or just starting out in the industry and Pro programming designed for established managers, label execs, artists, streamers, marketers, promoters and more.
The conference also offers consumer-facing events, with last year’s musical offerings happening in more than 200 venues around the city.
In late May, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek made headlines when he tweeted, “Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content.”
One person who took offense is deadmau5, who put up an Instagram post over the weekend offering feedback on Ek’s comment. “Incorrect,” the producer’s caption reads. “The cost of creating content was 25+ years of my life and much of those proceeds going to your company you complete f–king idiot.”
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The post garnered nearly 38,000 likes and many comments, with one person writing, “We hate Spotify so much,” to which the Canadian electronic producer responded by saying, “feel that, I’m about to pull my catalog from these f–king vultures, enough’s enough.”
As of publishing, the producer’s catalog is still available on Spotify, where he currently boasts nearly 5 million monthly listeners.
“I’ve been saying for a long time that we as the IP owners, the artists, the artist managers and the major record companies have allowed these multibillion-dollar companies to build platforms and companies with our art and our fans, and now we’re locked out,” deadmau5’s manager Dean Wilson tells Billboard in regards to royalty rates on DSPs like Spotify. “We can’t talk to our fans on the platform with our art that we’ve built.
“When you say that out loud, it’s insane that we keep allowing that to happen,” Wilson continues. “They’re our fans that we drive to platforms with our art, and unless we pay [the platforms]…you can’t get to your fans. Or you don’t even know if you’re getting to your fans. It’s like, if you spend this amount of money and move this needle on that, you could get to maybe this amount of people.
“Then how much data do we get back in return? The bare minimum they can give you. Ask me today, ‘How much am I getting paid per stream on Spotify?’ I don’t know. And that’s our job. How crazy is that, that that’s our business, and if you stream my record for more than 30 seconds today, I can’t tell you what that generated. It’s in this mythical bucket.”
In April, Spotify reported that its first-quarter revenue jumped 20% and gross profit topped 1 billion euros ($1.08 billion), helping return the 18-year-old streaming company to profitability and putting it on track to meet its 2024 growth target.
Earlier this month, the streamer announced that it’s raising prices for the second consecutive year, with its premium individual plan in the U.S. increasing by a dollar to $11.99 a month starting July 1. The platform’s duo plan will also go up by a buck to $16.99 a month while the family plan will be increased by $3 to $19.99 a month.
Despite the price hikes, royalty rates recently went down for songwriters on the platform. By adding audiobooks to premium offerings like individual, duo and family plans, Spotify claims these subscriptions are now “bundles” — a type of plan that qualifies it for a discounted rate on U.S. mechanical royalties given that multiple products are offered under one price. According to Billboard estimates, the change means publishers and writers will earn about $150 million less in royalties over the course of Spotify’s first bundled year.
Since the bundling change was first reported, Spotify has been targeted by the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) on multiple fronts. In May, it was hit with a lawsuit by the Mechanical Licensing Collective over the discounted rate. In response, Spotify has called the NMPA’s accusations “baseless” and “misleading” and argued of the MLC lawsuit that “bundles were a critical component” of the Phono IV agreement struck between publishers and streaming services.
Early in May, the New York house music stalwarts at Nervous Records were enjoying two hits in the top 10 on the Beatport chart: A zippy, heavily syncopated reimagining of Kendrick Lamar‘s “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe” by Liquid Rose and Trace (UZ), and a thunking version of Diddy and Keyshia Cole’s “Last Night” by Loofy.
In both cases, the older track was outfitted with a fresh vocal and re-tooled for dancefloors, swooping at just under 130 beats per minute. “There’s something special about being able to know all the lyrics and sing along to a brand new song — even though it’s not a brand new song,” says Rida Naser, associate director of music programming for SiriusXM’s BPM and The Pulse.
Many producers have taken note. Ghostbusterz tackled the Doobie Brothers’ “Long Train Running,” while Armonica, Zamna Soundsystem, and ROZYO took on the dance version of Lana Del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness;” both hit the Beatport Top 100. (Beatport, a popular site for DJs and electronic music enthusiasts, ranks songs according to the number of downloads.) Mr. Belt & Wezol’s re-do of Whitney Houston‘s resilient late-’90s classic “It’s Not Right But It’s OK” recently surpassed 65 million streams on Spotify.
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“We’ve been doing loads of these since 2018,” says Kevin McKay, a DJ, producer, and founder of the label Glasgow Underground. “A lot of artists were shying away from it because they felt it was uncool, or that they would be looked down on for it. Now almost all the labels are doing them.” For a time, Joe Wiseman, head of Insomniac Music Group, “was getting sent so many dance covers” that he considered issuing a moratorium on signing them.
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Dance music has a long history of referencing the past, often through club-ready remixes and prominent samples. But while most aspiring rockers cut their teeth in a cover band, “in dance music, that part gets skipped,” McKay says, “and people go straight to writing originals.”
Still, as anyone who’s ever attended a wedding knows, many people need to be coaxed onto the dance floor — often by hearing songs they already recognize. Plenty of club-goers need the same enticement.
Dance covers “evoke a sense of nostalgia, reminding [listeners] of the original hits and the memories associated with them,” says Wez Saunders, managing director of the label Defected Records. And those “reworks often serve as a gateway, drawing attention to the genre and leading listeners to discover new music.”
George Hess, a veteran dance radio promoter, believes the lack of shared experiences during the pandemic — when “new memories were difficult to create since people basically weren’t together enjoying each other’s company” — further heightened listeners’ desire for familiarity.
Around this time, mainstream pop saw a spike in “I know that one!” samples and in-your-face interpolations, offering some potential support for Hess’ theory. And two of the biggest singles to come out of the commercial dance world recently, ACRAZE’s “Do It To It” and David Guetta and Bebe Rexha’s “I’m Good (Blue),” borrowed liberally from old hits by Cherish and Eiffel 65, respectively.
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In a world where anyone with a computer can cobble together a dance track, it’s also possible that producers are increasingly incentivized to make covers as a way to lasso listeners overwhelmed with similar-sounding releases. In 2023, Luminate reported that more than 120,000 tracks hit streaming services daily. The flow of new tunes is more controlled at Beatport; still, between 20,000 and 25,000 fresh tracks hit the platform per week.
Nervous Records works with Louie Vega, “who always uses live musicians” to inject different tones and textures into his tracks, says label co-founder Mike Weiss. “With fewer producers doing that, a lot of them are all using the same plugins,” and covers offer a way to stand out.
McKay believes the covers trend may be more about channeling the knock-out top lines and gleaming hooks of the originals: “We have a dearth of songwriting talent, so when you’re on the dance floor, you get this amazing song from the past and it just blows away a lot of the current content.” Glasgow Underground has done well on the Beatport chart with covers of The S.O.S. Band, Kylie Minogue, ABBA and more.
In addition, the complex dynamics of the music business ensure that sampling or interpolating a song is an arduous process, potentially making covers a more attractive proposition. To clear a sample, a producer needs to obtain permission from the owner(s) of both the original composition and the recording. “Independent artists without representation might struggle to even get a response to their request,” explains Tim Kappel, an entertainment attorney and founder of the firm Wells Kappel. Their request might also be denied, he continues, or be granted only if the artist agrees to pay hefty up-front fees for using the material.
In contrast, artists can typically cover songs in the U.S. without the explicit approval of the original songwriters, under the somewhat vague condition that their “arrangement shall not change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work.” The original writers receive all the songwriting royalties from the resulting cover. “For a dance artist that just wants to consistently release music, the obstacles to clear samples and interpolations might outweigh the desire for the artist to have publishing on the underlying composition” and drive them to produce more covers, says Jodie Shihadeh, founder of Shihadeh Law.
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While dance music remakes have increased, they are not an automatic home run. In Wiseman’s view, the most obvious source material is “never the best” — he’s not looking for a house remake of Britney Spear’s “Toxic,” for example. “You want to get that feeling where someone’s like, ‘I know I heard that song years ago, and I loved it back then, but I don’t quite remember it,’” he continues.
And several label executives also emphasized that covers are just one tool they use to hook audiences. “As a label who’s been around for 33 plus years, [covers] can’t be our sole focus,” says Andrew Salsano, vp of Nervous Records.
Nervous Records is hopeful that one more reimagined classic can light up dancefloors this summer: On July 19th, the label will put out a new version of Cher‘s “Believe” from Super Flu. While the original thrums like an overheated racecar engine, the Super Flu release builds slowly, replacing Cher’s Auto-Tune flourishes with a conversational delivery, trading in triumph for something more ambivalent.
DJs are already testing the Super Flu single in their sets. “I’ve been in clubs when it’s been played,” Weiss says. The dancers’ response?
“Very emotional.”
Once again, the annual Broadway Bares charity burlesque benefit show not only raised temperatures, but also raised a bevy of money for a good cause. Over two sold-out shows on June 23 at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, more than 200 dancers strutted their stuff and helped generate $2,259,134 for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS (BC/EFA) – […]
Last week, the Recording Academy unveiled a flurry of rule tweaks that will be implemented at the 2025 awards. Among these 10 changes, three are directly related to the dance/electronic categories and a fourth also affects the dance/electronic categories.
One of the changes involves an award that was introduced to the Grammys just this year, with the “best pop dance recording” category now being called “best dance pop recording.” This tweak is not just a matter of aesthetics, but meant to make the category more accurately reflect the well-established style of dance pop music it was created to showcase.
The proposal for this name change, reviewed by Billboard, stated that “last year we conceded with Recording Academy staff to amend the award name to ‘Pop Dance’ rather than ‘Dance Pop’ for the purposes of classifying and defining: ‘what kind of Dance’. However, the result of this decision has been one of regular confusion and clarification. Numerous articles in mainstream media would either ‘correct’ or get ‘confused’ or ‘incorrectly label’ the Grammy Award.
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“The confusion,” the proposal continues, “has also led some people to question if this is a Pop category award, or a Dance category award. It is of extreme importance to the Dance/Electronic community, and the driving intention of the invention of the award, that it be recognized in the Dance category, albeit for the most Pop-leaning sounds of Dance music.”
With this new category functioning as intended during its debut this year, this new change is likely to only help the category establish itself as a home for electronic music with a pop lean, allowing space in the best dance/electronic recording category for more traditional electronic tracks and generally creating more space for dance/electronic music at the Grammys.
The next rule change involves the best remixed recording category, which has long focused on dance/electronic artists but was never an official dance/electronic category.
That changes in 2025, with this category being moved from the production, engineering, composition & arrangement field into the pop & dance/electronic field, a shift that makes sense given how deeply remixing is embedded in and largely synonymous with the dance/electronic realm.
To wit, the 2024 nominees in this category included tech house titan Dom Dolla and longstanding producer Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, with winners since the award was introduced in 1998 having included genre legends like Frankie Knuckles, Deep Dish, Roger Sanchez, Louie Vega, Justice, David Guetta, Skrillex and Tiësto.
The next tweak changes the name of the “best dance/electronic music album” to “best dance/electronic album.” The title change was made given that the word “music” was more or less considered unnecessary.
More crucially, this change also amends the definition of the category, which now states that “albums must be made up of at least 50% dance/electronic recordings to qualify.” This change is quite likely a result of the nomination of and subsequent win for Beyoncè’s Renaissance in 2023. Given that the album is not composed entirely of dance/electronic music, Renaissance‘s inclusion in the dance/electronic album category was the cause of major debate within the electronic music community.
Many felt it wasn’t a purely dance/electronic album, while others embraced it not only for its music but for how it shined a light on the Black and LGBTQ origins of the genre music itself. Given this definition change, however, it’s possible a similar album might be included in the dance/electronic album category going forward.
And while the final change is one that affects many categories, it’s especially significant for dance music. The tweak states that all eligibly credited featured artists with under 50% playtime will now be awarded a winners’ certificate for all genre album categories. These certificates previously went only to producers and engineers with less than 50% playing time; mastering engineers (if they weren’t also the artist) and immersive producers and immersive engineer/mixers.
“Most often,” the proposal for this change stated, “a Featured Artist would be a Vocalist that performed on one or multiple songs on the record, but didn’t achieve 50% playtime as a whole (otherwise they would be a Grammy winner).”
While featured artists could still previously get a certificate, this certificate did not come automatically, and many featured artists were unaware that they were eligible to apply for a certificate, which also previously cost $150. This was different from the process for contributors like engineers and producers, who received certificates automatically and didn’t have to pay the fee.
The Rules and Guidelines booklet for the upcoming 67th annual Grammy Awards sheds some light on certificates: “Individuals on a Grammy-winning recording whose roles are listed under Certificate receive a Winners Certificate from the Academy after the telecast but are not Grammy nominees or Grammy winners. These individuals can say they ‘worked on a Grammy winning project’ but are not ‘Grammy winners.’
“Additionally, those who worked in certain roles on Grammy-winning and Grammy-nominated projects but are not nominees, winners or recipients of Winners Certificates can order a Participation Certificate. These can be ordered for a fee from the Academy website.”
The proposal, introduced by members of the electronic music community, argued that in dance, this difference “disproportionately affects female creators or people of color,” stating that “vocalists in the Dance/Electronic community are predominantly people of color and female.” The last four winning albums in dance/electronic category (Fred again’s Actual Life 3 (January 1 – September 9 2022), Beyoncè’s Renaissance, Black Coffee’s Subconciously and Kaytranada’s Bubba) included 27 featured artists, 14 of whom are women and 21 of whom are people of color.
Given that the dance/electronic categories have had a dicey history in terms of representing women and people of color, this change opens up the category to recognize a more diverse group of artists. The change was co-proposed by Aluna, who last year expressed frustration about the number of white men nominated in the categories.
“You can say awards are bullshit but they ARE career builders,” the producer/writer/singer and label founder wrote upon the announcement of the new rule tweaks. “Today I got word that a change I fought for was implemented at the Grammys and I want to explain why it’s MASSIVE! As a Black woman in Dance music you get the message loud and clear; your value is as the Featured Artist not the main act. Labels, managers, leading (white male) artists in the field, festival bookers and media all tell us that our voices are incredibly valuable but investing in us as artists is rarely on the table.
“Now, while I can’t change this culture overnight with my label Noir Fever,” the statement continues, “I saw that while being featured artists is our bread and butter, it’s someone else’s Grammy award so there’s a simple shift that could be made; Featured artists need the credit they deserve when contributing to Albums. In the past if you poured your heart into a song on another artists’ Album that won you still went home with nothing. Now I’m proud to share that every featured artist who has sung on a Grammy winning album will get a certificate.”
Life Is Beautiful is getting a makeover. The longstanding Las Vegas festival announced major changes for its 2024 event on Tuesday (June 25), with the event trimming down from a three- to two-day show and moving to a new site not far from the old one in downtown Las Vegas.
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While Life Is Beautiful previously happened across 18 city blocks in the downtown Arts District, this year’s show is happening at a smaller site on the other side of downtown’s Fremont Street Experience, a five-minute walk from The Arts District.
The lineup is also more focused this year, with the Sept. 27-28 party featuring 14 electronic acts including LCD Soundsystem, Justice, Peggy Gou, James Blake, Jungle, Jamie xx, Neil Frances, LP Giobbi, Thundercat and Badbadnotgood. Sets will not overlap, with performances starting in each evening at 5 p.m. and happening one after the other until 2 a.m. Tickets go on sale Thursday, June 27, at 10 a.m. PT.
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This year, the festival is called Life Is Beautiful Presents: A Big Beautiful Block Party. The event is now entirely owned by Rolling Stone, which first acquired a majority stake in the festival 2022. (Rolling Stone is owned by Billboard‘s parent company, Penske Media Corporation.)
Rolling Stone CEO Gus Wenner tells Billboard that “for a number of reasons, we had to explore new locations,” but that it was “super important” for the festival to stay in downtown Las Vegas.
While the festival team considered taking a year off from the event, they instead landed on this new format, although Wenner says “our intention is to bring back the full-scale thing” in the coming years. While this three-day, multi-genre format will likely return, “this block party concept is something we might do quite a bit of” as well.
For now, though, “it was exciting for us to put something a little more focused together that wasn’t so multi genre.” He says electronic music has always been a core element of Life Is Beautiful lineups, and that “if you look at the festival landscape, I think this is a product there should probably be more of, as opposed to these big box festivals where you’ve got huge pop acts that are all playing the festival circuit with little permutations on different [events].”
Las Vegas is of course a historically strong market for electronic music, although A Big Beautiful Block Party “is a little bit different than what you get across a lot of Vegas,” Wenner says. “It’s less EDM and more indie electronic — more instruments on stage, riskier. We feel there is room in the market for this lineup and not just pulling mega-DJs that play in clubs on the Strip together into one spot. This has a unique point of view.”
A Big Beautiful Block Party happens on the same days at San Francisco’s electronic festival Portola, which will also feature performances by Justice, LP Giobbi, Empress Of, Neil Frances and Jamie xx. Wenner says “seeing how well people responded to Portola was was a really good sign for us. it’s something they’re excited about.”
Wenner says that since he got involved in the festival, he’s been “kind of overwhelmed at how much support there is for Life Is Beautiful in Las Vegas … I’d been told that, but to meet all the players and spend time in the community and talk to the small businesses that have been in and around the festival for for 10 years now, it’s been transformative. It definitely gives us a lot of appreciation and respect for what’s been built.”
Life Is Beautiful was founded in 2013 by Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos and an entrepreneur who had the vision to transform and revitalize the downtown Las Vegas community. Hsieh died in 2020 at the age of 46. Wenner says this year’s show “honors Hsieh’s legacy and the legacy of Life Is Beautiful and the spirit of it, while also evolving.”
While the festival looks different this year, the goal of A Big Beautiful Block Party is more or less the same as it’s always been.
“Bottom line,” Wenner says, “is we want to throw a f–king party.”
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL
Courtesy Photo