Music Midtown has announced its return to Atlanta, GA in 2023 for an expanded, three-day festival set to take place from Friday, September 15th through Sunday, September 17th at Piedmont Park. This year’s event will see an eclectic mix of 40+ high-profile artists perform across four stages.
On Friday, September 15th, P!NK and Flume will top a bill featuring Pitbull, J.I.D., Skaiwater, and Leah Kate. On Saturday, September 16th, Billie Eilish and The 1975 will take the stage following performances by Thirty Seconds To Mars, Niall Horan, Yung Gravy, Destroy Lonely, Louis The Child, Fletcher, Lizzy McAlpine, The Midnight, The Rose, Maude Latour, Sueco, and more.
The festival will come to a close on Sunday, September 17th with headlining appearances by Guns N’ Roses and Lil Baby in addition to Incubus, Tove Lo, Young Nudy, Glorilla, Masego, First Aid Kit, Big Wild, PJ Morton, The Garden, JP Saxe, Inhaler, Joy Oladokun, Magic City Hippies, and more.
Fans can sign up now for a ticket pre-sale featuring three-day tickets (first time ever) and a limited number of one-day tickets beginning on Thursday, May 18th at 10:00 a.m. ET. Remaining tickets will go on sale to the general public if available. For complete Music Midtown 2023 ticketing details, visit the festival website. Organizers have implemented all-in pricing for 2023, with all fees and taxes included upfront.
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This year’s event will mark the first running of Music Midtown since 2021. The planned 2022 edition of the festival was canceled just over a month before it was due to take place. A statement at that time from the festival cited undisclosed “circumstances beyond our control” as the catalyst for the cancellation, though various reports speculated that the decision came down to a standstill surrounding Georgia gun laws and the festival’s legal inability to enforce a “no weapons” policy at Piedmont Park.
As sources with knowledge of the situation confirmed to Rolling Stone following the 2022 cancellation, Music Midtown organizers wanted to bar firearms from the event, but since it takes place at a public park—one of many spaces in the state where people are allowed to carry handguns—the park’s “temporary users,” producers Live Nation Entertainment and C3 Presents, did not have adequate standing to supersede that law with their own ban.
The state’s “Constitutional Carry Act,” signed into law in April 2022, further complicated the situation for Music Midtown at Piedmont Park: With the new law in place allowing Georgians to carry a handgun in public spaces without a permit, the event’s ability to deploy metal detectors to enforce any potential weapons policy became a legal grey area, as well.
While the Georgia Supreme Court has issued various rulings upholding weapons restrictions for events on private grounds, events held in public spaces have had to pivot to address this obstacle. SweetWater 420 Fest, which formerly drew tens of thousands of music fans to Atlanta’s public Centennial Olympic Park, moved its 2023 event to the much-smaller SweetWater Brewery, a private facility. While organizers did not reference reasons for the move directly, their brief statement on the change of venue noted, “Safety and nonstop music are our top priority for this 420 Fest.” For more background on the complicated ripples of Georgia gun laws as they pertain to large-scale events, head here.
Live Nation Entertainment and C3 Presents have remained relatively quiet about the legal situation surrounding event-specific restrictions on firearms. In response to Live For Live Music‘s request for comment on organizers’ ability to enforce the “no weapons” policy, a representative referred to the official list of prohibited items on the Music Midtown website, which includes “weapons or explosives of any kind.”
Earlier this month, Shaky Knees Music Festival, another festival produced by C3 Presents and Live Nation, took place as planned at Atlanta’s Central Park with an identical policy in place prohibiting “weapons or explosives of any kind.” Per reports from attendees, the festival footprint for Shaky Knees was reconfigured to place the event’s single entrance in the parking lot of the adjacent Civic Center, a privately owned facility, which allowed the event to enforce a private-facility weapon policy upon entry.
It is unclear how Music Midtown will approach this situation when the festival returns to Piedmont Park in September, though a similar workaround will likely be employed to ensure the event’s ability to maintain its policy on firearms.
You can revisit the action from Music Midtown 2021 with Live For Live Music‘s photo coverage of the festival here.