iHeartCountry Festival Sets Nashville Tapings, Adds Gabby Barrett, Morgan Wallen, Riley Green
Yet another musical event that was supposed to take place in the spring has finally found a virtual home in the fall, as the iHeartCountry Festival, once set to be recorded in front of a live audience in Austin, will now be taped in Nashville in the coming weeks, to go out on iHeart stations and as a web stream on Oct. 23.
The updated plans for the festival/radio special include adding hitmaking newcomes Morgan Wallen, Gabby Barrett and Riley Green to the bill. Performances had previously been scheduled for Kane Brown, Sam Hunt, Dierks Bentley, Jon Pardi, Lady A, Kelsea Ballerini and Dustin Lynch.
That full bill had been scheduled for May 2 at Austin’s Frank Erwin Center. The Tuesday announcement from iHeart said the seventh annual edition of the show will now be recorded live on a single stage in Nashville, albeit no longer all on the same day.
The Oct. 23 broadcast will be heard on iHeart’s more than 150 country stations in the U.S. It will also be streamed that day exclusively on livexlive.com.
“Despite this year’s pandemic, we are honored to still be able to host one of country music’s most anticipated nights, with an iconic lineup of the genre’s biggest artists,” Rod Phillips, executive VP of programming for iHeartCountry, said in a statement. “Although fans won’t be able to celebrate in person, the show will be available to our millions of listeners across our iHeartCountry stations nationwide and through the exclusive stream on LiveXLive.”
A sister iHeartMedia event, the 2020 iHeartRadio Music Festival, will air as a similar virtual event, albeit televised and spread across two nights, on The CW Network this Sunday and Monday. That all-genre broadcast features several country artists as well, two of whom will be on both programs. Pardi will join Thomas Rhett for a performance, and Brown will be joined by Khalid and Swae Lee. Keith Urban will also perform. Other spotlighted guests for that show include BTS, Alicia Keys and Miley Cyrus.
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