SEMA FEST RETURNS
A MIX OF MUSICAL VIBES AND AUTOMOTIVE ENTHUSIASM WILL CAP OFF AN EXCITING SEMA WEEK
BY SEMA MAGAZINE EDITORS
>>Last year, SEMA debuted SEMA Fest, a concert festival combining headline music groups with automotive entertainment and more. Open to the public, the festival moves this year to the LVCC campus in Las Vegas.
Get ready to wrap up your SEMA Show Week in style with a night of heart-pounding live music and automotive activations at SEMA Fest, taking place on Friday, November 8. The stage will be packed with performances by Cage the Elephant, Sublime, Fitz and the Tantrums and Petey.
This unique, event will bring a fitting close to the the SEMA Show, uniting trade professionals and the public to celebrate car culture and the automotive lifestyle. Plus, this year, SEMA Fest will rock a new outdoor venue right at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), adjacent to the South Hall. The event requires tickets not included with SEMA Show or Friday Experience badges. Starting at just $49, a variety of ticket options are available at semafest.com.
“Our goal with SEMA Fest is to invite a young, diverse, ‘car-curious’ audience to mingle with our automotive-professional audience so that our industry can benefit from the synergies created,” says SEMA Vice President of Events Tom Gattuso. “We’re anticipating our marketplace’s needs of the future, and our inaugural SEMA Fest in 2023 laid a solid foundation. We reached a new group of people with whom we don’t typically attract, and they came to the event and gave really positive feedback. The 2024 iteration of SEMA Fest promises to take the entertainment, excitement and connections to even higher levels.”
Of course, music and car culture have always shared a close connection. Ask any car or truck enthusiast, and they’ll eagerly list their favorite tracks for cruising. Gattuso says SEMA Fest leans into this dynamic, and the 2024 event will play an important role in growing the industry’s brand recognition among consumers while inspiring their support for industry businesses.
“We see the event as a means of spreading the automotive lifestyle among consumers, converting fans to enthusiasts, and enthusiasts to evangelists. It helps connect the dots between the trade-only SEMA Show and our ultimate end users, and will be vital to our industry advocacy efforts as well,” he explains.
Since 2011, the annual SEMA Show has been nurturing the relationship between the industry and its enthusiast consumers in various ways, starting with the annual SEMA Cruise vehicle parade out of the LVCC. In 2014, that highly attended public event helped spawn SEMA Ignited, the official SEMA Show “afterparty” open to the general public. In 2021, the SEMA Show Friday Enthusiast Experience debuted, admitting a limited number of qualified enthusiast- consumers and content creators onto the Show floor for the trade event’s final day.
Building on such outreaches to the public, last year Show officials debuted SEMA Fest, a one-of-a-kind concert festival seamlessly blending motorsports, music and car culture. (The concept was the evolution of SEMA Ignited.)
Held at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds, the 2023 SEMA Fest offered enthusiast-consumers an event of their own—and they overwhelmingly responded. SEMA Fest drew an estimated 16,000-plus attendees with the musical acts of Imagine Dragons, Incubus and Wiz Khalifa, among others. There were also a variety of craft foods and beverages, along with a large marketplace of automotive and other nonendemic vendors. But most of all, there was plenty of automotive entertainment to rev up the crowds, courtesy of Formula Drift, Nitro Circus and Hoonigan.
Following on that successful launch, SEMA plans to take this year’s 2024 event up a notch by merging its musical vibes with the automotive attractions of the SEMA Show. The goal, said Gattuso, is “to create a truly unique and unforgettable experience for car and music lovers alike.”
For decades, Gattuso points out, the specialty equipment industry’s non-trade enthusiasts have envied the SEMA Show’s trade-only attendees—but mostly from a distance. SEMA Fest’s new venue now brings them closer to the Show—symbolically uniting them with the specialty automotive industry and creating greater potential for brands inside the Show halls to connect with audiences outside.
2024 SEMA FEST
GET YOUR TICKETS NOW
Tickets to the 2024 SEMA Fest, open to the public, start at just $49 and are available at semafest.com. SEMA Fest ticket provider Tixr offers payment plans with monthly installments, where guests will pay the full ticket price in recurring monthly payments until a final date, which is determined when purchasing the tickets.
Tickets must be paid by the final payment date set for them to be valid at the event. Complete payment plan details and an agreement are available on semafest.com when purchasing tickets. 2024 SEMA Fest ticket options include:
• CONCERT GENERAL ADMISSION (GA)–$49: Entry to all SEMA Fest concert GA viewing areas; does not include access to the Las Vegas Convention Center SEMA Show exhibit halls.
• CONCERT VIP ACCESS–$99: Exclusive access to the VIP viewing area with premium sightlines; VIP bars and washrooms; separate entrance for VIP pass holders at the entrance; device charging stations; does not include access to the Las Vegas Convention Center SEMA Show Exhibit Halls.
• In addition, exclusive tickets are available for the “SEMA Show Friday Enthusiast Experience”—an opportunity for members of the general public to walk the halls of the SEMA Show who normally do not qualify to attend.
Note: Your SEMA Show badge will not get you into the SEMA Fest concerts; a SEMA Fest concert ticket must be purchased. SEMA Fest attendees are also encouraged to secure their hotel stay for the concert event as soon as possible, through SEMA Fest’s official hotel block. Details can be found at semafest.com.
“Relocating the festival onto the LVCC campus promises to further fuel this intermix between the specialty-automotive industry and a new generation of potential consumers,” notes Gattuso. “And for our SEMA Show attendees, SEMA Fest is the perfect combination of music and automotive entertainment to cap off an exciting Show Week.
>>Drifting, car builds and other displays of motorsports excitement will be on tap at the 2024 SEMA Fest.
