Lollapalooza Paris

Lollapalooza Paris is a rock, pop and hip hop festival at Hippodrome ParisLongchamp, in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, France. The first edition ran on 22 and 23 July 2017. Live Nation France, the French arm of Live Nation Entertainment, produces it. It is not Lollapalooza Chicago, the Grant Park gathering that reset the brand in 2005. It is not Berlin, Stockholm, Mumbai or the São Paulo, Buenos Aires or Santiago editions. It is the Paris version announced on 12 October 2016 and built on the Longchamp track.

The Lollapalooza brand began in 1991 with Perry Farrell as a Jane’s Addiction farewell tour. After pauses and a failed restart, in 2005 Farrell and C3 Presents locked it as an annual Chicago festival. Live Nation took majority control of C3 in 2014. In France, Angelo Gopee, then CEO of Live Nation France, presented Paris as the missing piece beside Main Square and Download. Matthias Leullier answered political criticism by stressing that Live Nation France was a French company with hundreds of temporary jobs on the build. The ground chosen was not a banlieue woodland: it was the Longchamp racecourse, between the Bois de Boulogne and the Seine, with stands and tracks turned into stages. Longchamp forces a capital-city security setup: long queues, bag checks and a perimeter you feel when crossing from the Bois. From the centre the route crosses the Bois de Boulogne; from the suburbs people use RER and links to the site gate. The racecourse brings fixed stands and track space; there is no need to invent a camping valley to explain the scale.

The first weekend drew about 110,000 people according to official and press sources. Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Weeknd headlined. Lana Del Rey, Imagine Dragons, London Grammar, Alt-J, Liam Gallagher, DJ Snake, Marshmello and French names such as IAM or La Femme also featured. The format mixed stadium rock, radio pop, hip hop and dance electronics on one site. You arrive by RER, metro or bus toward Porte Maillot or Bois stops; you walk or take a short link to the track. There is no tent campsite as the main door. There is a racecourse perimeter, dense security and a crowd mixing Paris, the provinces and July tourists. Gopee put the initial target near 50,000 to 55,000 tickets a day for the first edition, with hundreds of accredited media. South American and Asian editions of the same brand do not change the fact that Paris plays out at Longchamp. The mix of rock, pop and hip hop in the same weekend is the US brand’s inheritance adapted to the French July calendar.

In 2020 the pandemic cancelled the edition. In 2022 the festival returned over two days with about 130,000 people. In 2023 it moved to three days, 21 to 23 July, with about 170,000 attendees and bills that included Kendrick Lamar, Rosalía, Aya Nakamura, Damso, Lil Nas X and Stray Kids. The jump to three days is not a season announcement here: it is the scale change that the 2023 sources have in writing. In 2024 the Paris edition did not run because of Olympic-related restrictions and capital security logistics. That belongs to the site’s verified history, not to a future calendar. The racecourse brings fixed stands and track space; there is no need to invent a camping valley to explain the scale. Longchamp forces a capital-city security setup: long queues, bag checks and a perimeter you feel when crossing from the Bois.

There is no need to mix Lollapalooza Paris with Chicago. There the frame is Grant Park and Lake Michigan. Here the frame is Longchamp and the Bois de Boulogne. Berlin has another racecourse and another local promoter. Stockholm, Mumbai and the South American editions use the same brand with another city and date. If a poster shows Illinois or Brandenburg and says Lollapalooza, that is not this one. This one has ParisLongchamp, July 2017 and Live Nation France. The name clash stops at the city and the racecourse. The mix of rock, pop and hip hop in the same weekend is the US brand’s inheritance adapted to the French July calendar. Gopee put the initial target near 50,000 to 55,000 tickets a day for the first edition, with hundreds of accredited media.

Lollapalooza Paris is the rock, pop and hip hop festival Live Nation France put on at Longchamp in 2017 under the Farrell and C3 brand. The scale is tens of thousands a day. The ground is an urban racecourse, not a camping field. Paris, Longchamp and 2017 are enough to separate it from Chicago, Berlin, Stockholm or India. The trip through the Bois explains arrival. The first weekend’s bill already mixed Chili Peppers, The Weeknd and dance electronics. That is how the French edition reads: same brand, different map.