People Who Write for Rolling Stone Magazine Have Bought a Big Part of the Life Is Beautiful Festival.

Rolling stone magazine buy-in 2022-Life Is Beautiful, the annual music and arts festival held in downtown Las Vegas has bought a controlling share in Rolling Stone.

The deal, the details of which were not disclosed, is part of a bigger push by Rolling Stone and its parent company, Penske Media Corporation, to expand their live event business. While Life Is Beautiful will continue to take place in Las Vegas each year, Rolling Stone wants to expand the festival's digital impact and bring it to new regions.

“Live events must be able to tell tales, establish a narrative, and have an effect through material that extends beyond the once-a-year event,” says Rolling Stone CEO Gus Wenner. “So I believe the combination of Rolling Stone's magnitude of over 60 million readers and our capacity as a journalistic organisation, to mix that with an incredible live event that attracts 180,000 people every year — that's new terrain and really, very intriguing.”

“We are excited to fulfil the promise of Life Is Beautiful in conjunction with Rolling Stone,” said David Oehm, CEO of Life Is Beautiful. The Rolling Stone team will assist us to enhance our relationship with music lovers globally, while also promoting the cultural activities that make Life is Beautiful so much more than a music festival, as a historic institution and touchstone of the music industry for over 50 years.”

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Rolling stone magazine buy-in 2022-Life Is Beautiful debuted in 2013 with headlining performances by Kings of Leon and Las Vegas natives The Killers. Last year's event included performances by Billie Eilish, Green Day, and A$AP Rocky, and while the lineup for 2022 has yet to be revealed, the festival is expected to take place Sept. 16 through 18.

Tony Hsieh, the late former CEO of Zappos, launched Life Is Beautiful in the hopes of transforming and revitalising downtown Las Vegas, which is located a few miles away from the city's famed main strip (Hsieh died in 2020 after being injured in a house fire). Life Is Beautiful has helped bring over $350 million in economic impact and cultural capital to downtown Vegas and the surrounding region in the nine years since its inception.

Wenner, who attended last year's festival, was impressed not just by the music (he recalls Jacob Collier putting on surprise guest T-Pain for a performance of Gnarls Barkley's “Crazy”), but also by the festival's distinctive atmosphere.

“A lot of festivals seem the same,” he adds, “but this one is placed in the streets of the city centre, with this art aspect and local merchants — you could feel the DNA of it.” “This one has a very special aspect to it, and it truly does harken back to Tony's initial idea… It feels like it belongs downtown, which is a very different neighbourhood from the strip. When you think of the Bellagio and whatever else comes to mind when you think of Vegas, it's not all flash and glory. It's the downtown community that's fascinating, and the festival brings out that part.”

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“Tony realised that his capacity to transform people's lives was multiplied tremendously by his ability to bring clever, ambitious, people-focused entrepreneurs together,” Hsieh's father, Richard, noted. “One of Tony's finest demonstrations of his passion to bring people together is the Life Is Beautiful festival.”

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Life Is Beautiful was purchased by Rolling Stone just over a year after P-MRC, the joint venture between the magazine's publisher, PMC, and MRC, bought a share in South by Southwest. P-MRC became a long-term partner and stakeholder after purchasing a 50% stake in the annual Austin event.