Hip-hop music festival Rolling Loud is going virtual this fall with a series of online concerts planned to broadcast live on Twitch Sept. 12-13.
Rolling Loud was founded in 2015 to be a touring festival for hip-hop (and cannabis) enthusiasts across the country. A Rolling Loud festival was set to take place in Miami May 8-10, but was postponed to Feb. 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. In the meantime, fans can connect with artists on Twitch, as Rolling Loud promises each of its festival days will contain over five hours of live entertainment.
The festival did not announce which artists are signed up to perform at its virtual events, and a spokesperson told TheWrap a lineup will be released “closer to the actual festival dates.”
Twitch head of music content Will Farrell-Green said in a statement, “as in-person concerts are put on hold, we’re working to create an incredible backstage environment that fans can access from anywhere in the world.”
Rolling Loud said it will begin posting hip-hop content on its Twitch channel (which has over 12,700 followers) beginning Sept. 1. Shows Rolling Loud will broadcast on Twitch include a livestreamed podcast hosted by Rolling Loud co-founders Tariq Cherif and CEO Matt Zingler called “The Founders,” a six-month freestyle competition series called “Got Bars,” and “Loud Gaming,” a live-streaming video game show pits artists, influencers and athletes against each other in-game.
The three-festival series is the first digital-only event Rolling Loud’s produced in its five-year history and a spokesperson for Twitch said it’s also the first Twitch Music content partnership of its kind.
Twitch is just starting to hold music events and Rolling Loud is its second this year; it hosted a stay-at-home version of the San Francisco Outside Lands music festival aptly called Inside Lands Aug. 28-29.
“Over the years, Rolling Loud has become a pillar in hip-hop culture, from booking emerging artists before they pop off to creating some of the most fire merchandise drops in the game, and we wanted to further our position in the culture through weekly programming on our Twitch channel,” Zingler said in a statement Monday. “We’ve always had our eyes on content creation; it felt like the natural next step for the brand, but it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that we had the bandwidth to execute these ideas to the fullest.”