Austin has a type: guitars, swagger and an unspoken civic agreement that the best music involves someone who learned their craft in a garage. So staging a full-scale festival headlined by Calvin Harris and Christina Aguilera during SXSW weekend was a bold move, but Coca-Cola Sips & Sounds Music Festival delivered.
Coca-Cola brought the festival back to the Live Music Capital for its fourth edition from March 13-14, showcasing a blend of indie, rock, pop and electronic acts ranging from Major Lazer to Foster The People to Grouplove. Auditorium Shores is already one of the better outdoor venues in the country, but whoever decided to position the event’s two stages to perfectly frame the downtown Austin cityscape deserves a raise.
Credit: Andrea Escobar Garcia
The festival’s undeniable highlight was its closing performance, a 90-minute DJ set delivered by an ageless Calvin Harris. He reached deep into his endless bag of dance anthems and dropped his own remixes of them, pushing the energy higher and higher. Songs we’ve all heard a thousand times found new life in the crisp spring Texas air, like ‘Sweet Nothing’ and ‘How Deep Is Your Love.’
The Scottish superstar is one of the very few EDM artists who can credibly close a major multi-genre festival on name recognition alone, and unless he miraculously headlines ACL, it’ll likely be a while before fans in Austin can experience a set like this again.
As fireworks dotted the skyline, Harris closed with a euphoric spin of ‘Levels,’ the generational dance anthem from the late Avicii. During SXSW in the Live Music Capital of the World. In a city that generally treats electronic dance music as a genre to tolerate rather than celebrate, the choice felt deliberate, acknowledging why this sound fills a field like none other.
The crowd had ample room to dance, the food and drinks were exactly what you’d expect from a festival with a major beverage company’s name on it, and the whole thing wrapped at 10pm for those with early mornings ahead. After all, this is Austin, where there’s as many run clubs and group fitness classes as there are indie bands with tattooed drummers.
Speaking of dancing, the floor situation at Sips & Sounds deserves its own paragraph. No sweat-soaked, tunnel-visioned ravers elbowing for real estate. No drunken frat bros interrupting your flow state by using the lyrics to ‘Feel So Close’ for a lame pickup line. Just a giant open-air dance party and the kind of mature, respectful crowd that was there for the music.
Credit: Andrea Escobar Garcia
All said and done, Coca-Cola didn’t reinvent the outdoor festival, but that wasn’t the goal. It was to execute one through the lens of experiential marketing, which they did exceptionally well.
And in an era when corporations shamelessly feed ads down our throats like a grandma who won’t let you leave the table until you’ve had thirds, wouldn’t you rather embrace it at a music festival than online, bombarded by invisible sponsorships disguised as content?
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