Billie Eilish, Guns N’ Roses, Pink, Lil Baby, the 1975, and Flume will headline the 2023 Music Midtown festival, which will take place Sept. 15-17 in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. For Eilish, it’s only her 10th announced performance of 2023, all of which are festivals in the U.S. and Europe.
The Music Midtown lineup will also include Pitbull, J.I.D., Thirty Seconds to Mars, Niall Horan, Yung Gravy, Incubus, and Tove Lo, among others. Tickets go on sale Thursday (May 18) through the festival’s web site.
As previously reported, the 2022 edition of Music Midtown was canceled in the wake of a 2019 Georgia Supreme Court ruling making it easier for people to carry firearms onto publicly owned property such as Piedmont Park.
The Live Nation-produced festival did not specify the reason for the cancellation at the time, but local media reports confirmed the behind-the-scenes battle to clarify whether Music Midtown organizers had any leeway to bar firearms from the site in the face of the 2019 ruling. A source told SPIN that organizers had also been searching for an alternate venue but were unable to secure one in time to move forward this year.
The 2019 ruling outlined new restrictions on whether businesses could bar guns on publicly owned land, following a 2014 lawsuit by a Georgia gun rights group involving one of its members being denied entry into the Atlanta Botanic Garden with a pistol.
The issue was further confused by differing standards for enforcement based on the types of leases businesses had to operate on state-owned land. In the case of a festival like Music Midtown, many artist contracts specify that they will refuse to perform in places where local or state gun laws allow attendees to carry weapons in the venue, creating an untenable situation for organizers.
No firearms policy has been announced for the 2023 edition of the festival.
