Camila Cabello, Dua Lipa, Keith Urban, New Kids on the Block & More Photos From 2024 iHeartRadio Music Festival
The 2024 iHeartRadio Music Festival brought the biggest voices on radio to the stage for two music-packed nights on Friday and Saturday at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, and Billboard was backstage and in the pit for all the action.
Night 1 saw Dua Lipa and Camila Cabello hit the stage, and Billboard‘s camera caught the pop powerhouses backstage for a sweet embrace, as well as Cabello’s meet-up with fellow Friday performer Gwen Stefani. We also captured Shaboozey walking the halls backstage after performing his now-11-week Billboard Hot 100-topping breakout hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”
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Night 2 kicked off with New Kids on the Block, who just announced last week that they’ll launch their first-ever Las Vegas residency on June 20 at Dolby Live at Park MGM. So was the iHeart set a good preview of what fans can expect? “A really small preview, because this was 20 minutes,” Donnie Wahlberg told Billboard backstage. “We’re going to do a very long, very intricate, hopefully very exciting and fun and energetic set with a lot of songs, a lot of hits, a lot of feels. But it was also a sample for us of the audience. Because it’s a real good example of what it might be like. A lot of New Kids fans showed up, and a lot of fans who were experiencing us for the first time. We pride ourselves on the fun and the energy that we bring to a show, and this was a great opportunity for us to share that with this crowd.” We also caught up with Donnie’s wife, Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg, backstage who is ready to house-hunt in Sin City: “Now I just get to come to Vegas and find a place to live, because we’re absolutely going to be finding houses to station ourselves here for a few months — or a few years, maybe.” The New Kids also invited Flavor Flav out onstage for their “Hangin’ Tough” finale, and we caught the Public Enemy hype man backstage with Wahlberg and bandmate Danny Wood.
Keith Urban also played on Saturday night, making the most of a brisk 20-minute set by playing three songs from his just-released High album: “Messed Up as Me,” “Wildside” and “Straight Line.” “We just packed ’em in as quick as possible,” Urban laughed backstage, adding that fans have been quick to embrace the new material. “It’s been immediate, which i haven’t seen that in a long time. It is what it is with songwriting — you write songs and some connect immediately and some take awhile — but when we did ‘Messed Up as Me’ from this record, it was immediate, because we were playing festivals, and it was immediate. ‘Wildside’ was immediate, the first night we did that. ‘Straight Line’ — it’s a different record.”
Before night 2 kicked off, Billboard caught up with OBB Media founder and CEO Michael D. Ratner, whose team produced the festival livestream, which broadcast both nights on Hulu in real time. After teaming up with iHeart for livestreams of the New York and Los Angeles stops of Jingle Ball late last year, Ratner said his team was able to jump in seamlessly to take the reins of the iHeartRadio Music Festival for the first time in the fest’s 14 years. “The reason we work so well together is iHeart knows music,” he said on Saturday. “They have amazing talent relationships, as do we, but the idea that we’re able to storytell and make these shows more layered … it’s not just watching performance after performance after performance.” One key to that was adding some Vegas-specific touches, like teaming up mentalist Max Major with Cabello or enlisting the Blue Man Group for an intro. “You get these fun moments, and it’s embedded in the history of Vegas. … You mix that with what Vegas is today, which is residencies and EDM and lights and day parties and the Sphere, I think making it new and fresh while having a nod to old Vegas is cool. It’s a really good balance and team that makes the show very unique.”
If you weren’t in Vegas or just want to relive the two days of hits over again, find Billboard‘s best photos from backstage and onstage below.
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