A multiday music festival on the beach is a SoCal dream that has tantalized and vexed concert promoters for generations. Santa Monica, home to one of the most famous stretches of sand on the planet and plenty of music history, would seem a natural fit.
Why has no one been able to pull it off here?
“The biggest reason is it wasn’t an option,” said Nic Adler, the concert producer with Goldenvoice behind this fall’s new Ocean Way Festival on the sand in Santa Monica. “It wasn’t something that Santa Monica understood or wanted until recently.”
A confluence of the recent World Cup and the upcoming Olympics, a hard-hit Third Street Promenade retail corridor, and increased civic openness to live events in Santa Monica public spaces finally created an opening. Goldenvoice’s new flagship Westside festival, with the Killers and Olivia Dean playing Sept. 26-27, is a bold and potentially groundbreaking concert that will reintroduce the pricey beachside city to music fans used to going east.
“I think Santa Monica finally understood what they had in their backyard and was like, ‘We need to do something here,’” Adler said. “You step out of the car in Santa Monica and step on the beach. You will get the same feeling every single time, and it’s ‘Wow, I can’t believe that I’m here.’ They have one of the greatest untouched spots there is.”
Aside from the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, many of Goldenvoice’s smaller festivals — like the millennial-hipster Just Like Heaven or Chappell Roan’s recent Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things — are based in Brookside at the Rose Bowl, a verdant park and golf course in Pasadena. It’s close to where Goldenvoice’s prime concert-going audience lives around Los Angeles, with open space and infrastructure to make shows go smoothly.
But Goldenvoice threw many of its early punk concerts at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, a beloved and historic (yet mothballed for now) Welton Becket-designed modernist masterpiece. Ocean Way’s namesake is a recording studio founded in a Santa Monica garage by Allen Sides in the early ‘70s, which moved to Hollywood and tracked treasured LPs like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Green Day’s “American Idiot.”
“I grew up on the Westside. I went to school in Santa Monica. I bought my first skateboard at Rip City,” Adler said. “The cities that win are able to tell their cultural story. Santa Monica has incredible music history. Before the Forum, it was the Santa Monica Civic that held most of those large-scale music events. It has this history of culture, but it just needs to be retold.”
For the bill at Ocean Way, Goldenvoice broke from its usual fine-grained approach to genres and subcultural scenes for a broad but unmistakably beach-day-vibe collection of acts. From the most natural surf’s-up pick on the planet (Sublime) into the windows-down rock of Jack White and the Killers, to a magic-hour handoff from desert-rockers Khruangbin to jazz-pop crooner Olivia Dean, the music is populist and well attuned to the surroundings.
The bigger feat, arguably, was the civic work to make an event like this possible.
Festivals like Ohana in Dana Point and CRSSD in San Diego have leveraged beachside public space to create long-running festivals. Long Beach has a brand new amphitheater hoping to do the same. Santa Monica has previously had beach-adjacent concerts, like the decades-old Twilight concert series on the Pier, which recently ended.
Yet after electing a City Council super-majority in 2024, Santa Monica began a multifaceted, $60 million Realignment Plan designed to prepare the city for mass gatherings timed to the Olympics and other events. Another goal of the plan is to revitalize public spaces like the beach and businesses on the Third Street Promenade that never truly recovered post-pandemic.
“We really cannot keep doing the same things that we’ve always done, and expect for Santa Monica to shine,” Santa Monica Mayor Caroline Torosis said in an interview. “We have to invite people back to our city. We have been yearning to get back a big music festival on our beach to showcase the city, because the beach is our best asset.”
Torosis attributed the change of heart to a younger, majority-millennial City Council that grew up in the cultural glow of festivals like Coachella. Torosis touted the recent Santa Monica International Jazz Festival with Kamasi Washington as a smaller-scale event emblematic of what was possible. ”We are going to keep everything clean and safe. It’s going to be a precursor to what I hope is going to be happening during the Olympics, and to show that we can do it at scale,” she said.
Ocean Way arrives after the collapse of the LA Jazz Festival, which had bold ambitions for a 40,000-capacity set on Dockweiler Beach yet fell apart under permit and financial stress. An established promoter like Goldenvoice, working with an eager city council and a Coastal Commission seemingly more open to such events than in the past, will likely have an easier go of it. Tickets for Ocean Way, which begin at $249 for a single day and run up to $2,250 for a full weekend at the luxe Proper Beach Club, are more in line with Goldenvoice’s A-list portfolio than a local jazz fest.
“We’ve got to take a chance on new things,” Adler said. ”There is pressure. I think the city wants it, but that takes a little bit of risk and trying something new.”
Organizers are open about prioritizing Metro and cycling as preferred ways to arrive. Given that the fest is steps from the E Line, and in the middle of Santa Monica’s world-class bike infrastructure, there will be no dedicated on-site parking.
“I’ve been telling folks that this is a car-free festival,” Torosis said. “We have an amazing Metro and bus system that’s going to deposit people very close to the entry point. There’s going to be ample shuttle circulation from other parts of the city. But we are not going to be providing parking for people because we just don’t think that’s necessary. We want our pedestrians and bikers to be able to come in and feel safe.”
“Riding your bike on Ocean Front Walk is just one of the best feelings you can have,” Adler said. “We’re definitely encouraging that.”
If the festival’s plan works, it could be a new, emblematic Westside event for L.A.’s most influential promoter, and a potent reason to rediscover a beachside city with a music lore all its own.
“There’s no thought that this is a one-year festival,” Adler said. “We love the vision of where the city’s going, and we want to be part of that story moving forward. The sunset moment is 2½ hours long, and it’s just a sight to see. You don’t get those opportunities maybe ever as festival producers. We were looking for that, and we found it in Santa Monica.”
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