This year’s Music Midtown will feature a blend of rock and hip-hop acts with headliners Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Jack White and Future.
Other acts include 2Chainz, Phoebe Bridgers, Phoenix, Mitski, Turnstile, A Day to Remember, Conan Gray and Louis the Child.
Music Midtown will return Sept. 17 and 18 at Piedmont Park. There will be 30 acts in all on four different stages over two days.
Two-day tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday, May 20, with prices starting at $125.
The target audience for general admission tickets is ages 17 to 24, said Peter Conlon, the long-time organizer of Music Midtown going back to 1994 and Live Nation Atlanta president. The VIP areas are more populated with people in their 30s and 40s.
The festival has targeted a younger audience in recent years, basically focused on acts that have been popular the past 20 years.
Conlon said he was “blown away” by Fall Out Boy, who performed at Truist Park last year with Weezer and Green Day, so he deliberately sought the band out.
White, formerly part of the White Stripes and now solo, performed last year at rival Shaky Knees Festival. “He’s played Music Midtown before,” Conlon said. “He’s always been a favorite and fits a niche.”
And My Chemical Romance hasn’t played Atlanta in many years so Conlon sees pent-up demand.
Bridgers is coming to Cadence Bank Amphitheatre at Chastain Park on May 27 but he said her current popularity made her an easy pick to come back to Atlanta less than four months later. “The Chastain show sold out in one day,” Conlon said. “So a lot of people couldn’t get tickets.”
Conlon is just glad that Live Nation Atlanta is having a solid year for the first time since the pandemic began, that it’s back to business as usual. “It was nuclear winter for awhile” in 2020, he said. “I’d still go into the office since I’m a creature of habit. I’d be by myself and read a book,” he said.
Live Nation is opening new offices near Ponce City Market, he said. Conlon, who has been active in the business for more than four decades, currently bounces around among offices at Chastain, Lakewood and his home. He prefers to be around his employees. “I like to go down the hall and stick my head in and see what people are working on,” he said.
And he said inflation isn’t hurting his business that badly on either the demand or supply side. “Historically, we’ve been inflation proof,” he said. “People still buy tickets and want to experience concerts. We’ve been able to dodge those bullets.”
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