A centerpiece of Tony Hsieh's "Downtown Project" investment plan to revitalize the downtown area, when it debuted in 2013 as a two-day music, cultural, and culinary festival, with headliners including homegrown talent The Killers and Imagine Dragons, Life Is Beautiful drew a respectable crowd of 60,000. The following year, when it expanded to encompass three days, the musical lineup -- a more-than-respectable and Vegas-appropriate artist roster that included The Roots, Foo Fighters, Outkast, Skrillex, Arctic Monkeys, Panic! At The Disco, the Las Vegas Philharmonic Orchestra, Kanye West, and show-stealing-experiment-turned-Strip-headliner, Lionel Richie -- delivered a bigger crowd, with 90,000 tickets sold, but the increase was only in direct proportion to the addition of an extra day and less than 30 percent of attendees were out-of-towners.
2015 saw a new relationship forged with Insomniac Events, the company behind the highly successful Electric Daisy Carnival brand, a move aimed at broadening LIB's appeal by upping the EDM quotient. In addition, a new fifty-fifty partnership with downtown's Wendoh Media empire was announced.
Life Is Beautiful 2015 retained the three-day format and delivered another generally crowd-pleasing artist lineup that included Snoop Dogg, Duran Duran, Kendrick Lamar, Weezer, Death Cab for Cutie, Stevie Wonder, and a return to the stage for Las Vegas natives Imagine Dragons. Attendance at the event, which pretty much takes over a 16-block area of downtown for the duration, jumped to 108,000.
Yet, despite behind the seemingly encouraging stats, consistently high-caliber musical lineup, and LIB's celebrity chef-driven culinary appeal, the festival's balance sheet is anything but beautiful. In late January of this year, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that LIB somewhere north of $10 million in the red, with a hands-on executive for Downtown Project even strongly intimating that the fate of the 2016 festival was far from secure, pending some serious number crunching once the most current budget figures were available.
While there were rumors that the festival's debt might be significantly higher than $10 million, evidently whatever the books revealed gave grounds for optimism, since in early February it was officially announced that LIB would be returning for another three-day stint this September 23-25. Industry insiders say that the first three years, at least, of a music-festival startup event should be written off as loss leaders, with the need to invest disproportionately large sums in talent in order to establish a credible brand. Now that the three-year mark is up, it could be up to this September's festival to demonstrate whether or not Life Is Beautiful has what it takes.
