Imagine Dragons, Stevie Wonder headline Life is Beautiful

The three-day festival Sept. 25-27 pumps up on electronica this year with a stage devoted to dance music and a new partner in Insomniac, the producer of the Electric Daisy Carnival. EDM acts include Kygo, Major Lazer, Porter Robinson, Thievery Corporation, GRiZ, RL Grime and DJ Snake.

One of the four stages will be devoted exclusively to EDM and programmed by Insomniac, replacing last year’s live-band stage located next to the shuttered Western casino. Some of the electronica also will play the two main stages.

But live acts still dominate the lineup, with alt-rock and hip-hop including Killers frontman Brandon Flowers, Death Cab for Cutie, Weezer, Twenty One Pilots, Kid Cudi and Edwarde Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros.

“If you’re a fan of EDM and that’s what you want to come to the festival for, then awesome, we have that for you,” said Craig Nyman, the festival’s head of music and live performances. “But know that just a short walk away is three other stages programmed with the music that you’ve come to love the first two years of the festival.”

Wonder and Duran Duran should ease concerns that the festival would skew much younger this year, after the first two editions drew about 90,000 people over three days: comfortable for patrons spread over 15 city blocks downtown, but short of the saturation point that would make promoters rest easy.

“Everyone’s committed. It’s not uncommon to have to build your brand and it takes several years to do that,” said Allen Scott, executive vice president of Another Planet Entertainment, which books the live acts for the festival.

“Stevie Wonder is one of those acts we looked at from year one. Stevie is just one of those artists that crosses over to every demographic imaginable.”

Lamar plays the festival on the momentum of “To Pimp A Butterfly,” the rare rap album to spend two consecutive weeks in the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s album chart.

“This is a very rare get for a festival,” Scott said. “Kendrick is really limited the number of festivals he’s doing.”

Scott also said Life Is Beautiful will be the only U.S. festival ’80s pop heroes Duran Duran play this year. And Hozier is “obviously a show people in Las Vegas wanted to see and were not able to see” when the singer-songwriter quickly sold out the outdoor pool deck of the Cosmopolitan last month, he adds.

The Cosmopolitan “wanted to add another night, but he wanted to come back and play the festival.”

The first two years of Life Is Beautiful sold about half their tickets to Las Vegans.

“We start first thinking about what Las Vegas wants to see,” Scott says. That includes EDM, “but we don’t want it to overwhelm the rest of the lineup.”

The lineup also includes:

Atmosphere, Porter Robinson, Metric, DJ Snake, Awolnation, Walk the Moon, Run The Jewels, Rebelution, Future Islands, Soja, Royal Blood, Madeon, Glass Animals, Lindsey Stirling, Clean Bandit, Badbadnotgood & Ghostface Killah, Best Coast, Robin Schulz, The Green, TCHAMI, SZA Against Me! and Dan Deacon.

Also: Meg Myers, Cashmere Cat, New Politics, Tommy Trash, Two Gallants, Ryn Weaver, Shamir, What So Not, Big Data. Elle King, JAUZ, Saint Motel, BØRNS, X Ambassadors, Klingande, Halsey, SALVA, Leikeli47, The London Souls, Kaleo, Giraffage, Andra Day, Mercer, Night Terrors of 1927, Parade of Lights, Peking Duk, Jared & The Mill and Mercy Music.

Read more from Mike Weatherford at bestoflasvegas.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Mikeweatherford