Stereosonic organisers announce new FestivalX

Stereosonic organisers, Hardware and Onelove, have teamed up with Live Nation to create a new dance and hip-hop music festival. The event, FestivalX, will hit four Australasian cities in November and December later this year.

“FestivalX is going to showcase the best local and international talent while bringing fans a new festival experience,” comments Roger Field, CEO of Live Nation Australasia. “It’s going to be huge, and it’s going to be the pre-summer party fans have been waiting for.”

The festival will mark the start of the summer festival season in the southern hemisphere, a slot that up until 2016 was occupied by Stereosonic itself. Now, the team behind the festival are billing their new event as a “reliable, value for money musical experience,” with the hope it will attract 40,000 fans across its four dates.

“We’ve been working on this for while now and the time is right”

“We’ve been working on this for while now and the time is right,” Hardware’s Richie McNeill explains. In addition to a line up promising “Grammy, Billboard and ARIA Award winners,” McNeill says FestivalX has enlisted “stage designers and builders responsible for some of the most spectacular looking stage designs at Electric Daisy Carnival and ID&T.”

FestivalX represents the first collaboration with a multinational since Totem Onelove Group, owned by the now-defunct SFX Entertainment, was placed into bankruptcy in May 2016. As of February that year, the company was owed US$10.7 million by SFX. The new festival is organised by Onelove Music Group, a separate entity not connected with SFX.

The new event will kick off in Auckland on 29 November, followed by dates in Brisbane (30 November), Sydney (1 December) and Melbourne (2 December). Tickets and line up information will be released later on this year.

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