Miami Beach Pop Festival lineup includes Chance, Roots, Juanes
The South Beach Pop Festival unveiled on Thursday its bill of music acts descending on the shorelines of Miami Beach Nov. 8-10, a high-caliber lineup led by Chance the Rapper, Daddy Yankee, the Roots, Juanes and Maggie Rogers.
General admission tickets for the three-day sandy jamboree will go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday, June 21, via MiamiBeachPop.com and cost $175 for early-bird festival passes and $1,250 for the fancier VIP Star wristband, which includes private restrooms, shuttles and viewing areas among other perks. Miami Beach ticket buyers will receive a 20 percent discount (four tickets per household) if they live in zip codes 33139, 33140 and 33141.
The 40-act bill, debuting on 25 acres of Miami Beach between Fifth and 10th streets, will also be headlined by Norwegian DJ Kygo, Jack White’s rock quartet the Raconteurs, throwback soul crooner Leon Bridges, rap veteran T-Pain and disco-funk icons Nile Rodgers and Chic. The rest of the bill, mostly Miami-centric, will include DJ Windows 98 (Arcade Fire’s Win Butler), Bomba Estereo, Magic City Hippies, Afrobeta, Quinn XCII, Roosevelt Collier and the Miami Beach Senior High Rock Ensemble. Rodgers and Chic, along with other still-unannounced guests will lead an “all-star” celebration of Bob Marley, featuring performances from the singer-songwriter Ben Folds with the Frost School of Music and eighttime Grammy-winning singer Stephen Marley. The festival hasn’t yet announced its day-by-day schedule of performances.
Meanwhile, James Beard-winning chef Michael Schwartz (Michael’s Genuine Food and Drink) will program the festival’s culinary lineup and nod to the “city’s cross-cultural cuisine,” according to the festival’s website.
Big-ticket names for first-year South Florida music bashes are rare, but the South Beach Pop Festival came together with the combined clout of concert promoters Paul Peck and Steve Sybesma, the veterans behind Bonnaroo and Okeechobee Music Festival.
Sybesma, a music industry veteran for 40 years, left the Okeechobee Music and Arts Festival he created with Peck (Bonnaroo SuperJam, Outside Lands) following the festival’s inaugural event in 2016. They’ve since turned their attention to Miami Beach, and in 2018 pitched the concept for a music festival to the city of Miami Beach.
The three-day festival also will feature “mindfulness practices” along with meditation and yoga classes, the Miami Pop website confirms. Miami Beach commissioners greenlit the festival last fall, picking mid-November to avoid colliding with Art Basel’s enormous traffic every December and sea turtle nesting season (April-October).
Sybesma and Peck are organizing the festival with Miami-based ACT Productions, which currently programs Miami Beach’s Fire on the Fourth, the Veteran’s Day parade and multiple Art Basel Miami Beach gatherings.