Rolling Loud Miami Moves to December for the Festival's Tenth Year

Rolling Loud is celebrating its tenth anniversary by making things a lot cooler — literally.

The massive hip-hop festival has announced that its 2024 Miami edition will move to winter, taking place December 13-15 at its usual Hard Rock Stadium site. That's right, folk, one week after Miami Art Week and two weeks before Christmas.

The change is welcome news for anyone who has attended Rolling Loud's last few Miami events. After the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix took its prime spot in May after the pandemic, the festival held its previous three editions in July. Anyone who's lived through a Florida summer should know why hosting an outdoor music festival in a massive stadium parking lot in that season may not be optimal. Last year, even the performers could not take the "suffocating heat," as New Times' coverage noted, Ice Spice nearly melted.

It may be strange to think that Rolling Loud, now the world's largest multicity hip-hop festival brand and a must-play event for the genre's biggest stars, was once a tiny one-day event at Soho Studios in Wynwood. That inaugural festival ten years ago was scrappy local hip-hop promoter Dope Entertainment's first attempt to build an "Ultra for hip-hop" in Miami, and their first lineup boasted the likes of Schoolboy Q, Action Bronson, Juicy J, and a young Denzel Curry, among others.

Over the years, Rolling Loud's audience grew as hip-hop summited the charts, and Miami's scene, powered by Curry and a buzzy new wave of South Florida rappers including Kodak Black, Lil Pump, XXXtentacion, and Skee Mask the Slump God, was bursting with talent. Many of those artists would play subsequent editions as the festival kept expanding to bigger sites — Mana Wynwood in 2016 and a controversial bow at Bayfront Park in 2017 — until finally settling into Hard Rock Stadium in 2018.

The festival continues to attract rap's biggest stars and host editions across the globe. Besides California and Miami, this year will see Rolling Loud events in Vienna and Pattaya, Thailand. Previous editions have been held in Queens, New York; Toronto; Sydney; Munich; Rotterdam; and Portimão, Portugal. At this point, it's harder to name a prominent rapper that hasn't played the festival's various global editions; this year's California festival featured Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, Post Malone, and Future x Metro Boomin as headliners, and last year's Miami edition had Kodak Black, 21 Savage, and Lil Uzi Vert as special guests alongside headliners Playboy Carti, Travis Scott, and A$AP Rocky.

A lineup for this year's festival is yet to be announced, but you could probably put all the artists on the Rap Caviar Spotify playlist in a jar, shake it up, and pick out a bunch of names at random, and you'll probably come up with something close enough.

Tickets officially go on sale at noon on Friday, April 5, via rollingloud.com/miami2024. The festival is currently holding a presale for fans who sign up on its website; those who purchase tickets ahead of the official sale date will receive a free, exclusive T-shirt and a "Rage Pack" featuring a clear bag, sunglasses, lanyard, water bottle, bandana, and hand sanitizer.

Rolling Loud Miami 2024. Friday, December 13, through Sunday, December 15, at Hard Rock Stadium, 347 Don Shula Dr., Miami Gardens; 305-943-8000; hardrockstadium.com. Tickets go on sale Friday, April 5, at noon via rollingloud.com/miami2024.