Billie Eilish and Finneas, Joni Mitchell, Lady Gaga, Stevie Nicks, Sting, Katy Perry, Green Day and Jelly Roll will be part of the lineup for FireAid, the first fund-raising mega-event to support fire relief efforts in the Los Angeles era.
The benefit concert will take place on Jan. 30 — three days before this year’s Grammy Awards — at the Intuit Dome and Kia Forum, two arenas in Inglewood, Calif., with tickets going on sale through Ticketmaster next Wednesday, the event’s organizers announced on Thursday.
The show will also feature Earth, Wind & Fire, Gracie Abrams, Gwen Stefani, Lil Baby, Pink, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stephen Stills, Tate McRae and Dave Matthews with John Mayer, with “additional artists to be announced shortly,” the organizers said in a statement.
FireAid is to be broadcast at select AMC movie theaters, along with various other platforms including YouTube, Apple Music, Max, Paramount+, Prime Music, SiriusXM and iHeartRadio.
For the music industry, the concert will now become a focal point of the pre-Grammy week, when record labels and talent agencies typically host splashy parties and showcases. Those parties have now been canceled, with companies saying they would divert the money they would have spent to fire relief; the diplomatic language of the news releases announcing those changes hinted at a certain level of dissent in the industry over the Recording Academy’s decision to go forward with the Grammy ceremony at all, instead of moving or postponing it.
This week, the academy announced a reduced schedule of its usual pre-Grammy events, keeping on the calendar the MusiCares dinner — a tribute to the Grateful Dead, to benefit the Grammys’ flagship charity — and Clive Davis’s glitzy annual party. Those events, Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the academy announced, “will be about using the power of music to help rebuild, uplift and support those in need.”
The benefit concert was announced last Friday, with no artists attached to it, and only Intuit Dome as the venue. But gossip has swirled through the music industry in recent days that the show was coming together quickly, and had expanded into two venues, with the addition of the nearby Forum.
It is being produced by Irving Azoff, a longtime artist manager and industry power broker, along with his wife, Shelli, and their family, in conjunction with Live Nation and AEG Presents, the world’s two largest concert promoters, both of which are based in Los Angeles.
Eagles, the rock icons long associated with Azoff, are not on the FireAid lineup but announced yesterday they would donate $2.5 million to the cause. (The band is in the midst of a weekend residency at Sphere in Las Vegas, though is not scheduled to perform there during the week of FireAid.)
Organizers of the event said that proceeds from the show would go toward a nonprofit organization that would “focus on rebuilding infrastructure, supporting displaced families, and advancing fire prevention technologies and strategies to ensure L.A. is better prepared for fire emergencies.”
