New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash will return for its fifth year with a stellar headlining lineup featuring Jason Aldean, Lainey Wilson and Bailey Zimmerman.
The five-hour free concert takes place in Music City’s Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park. Special guests include CeCe Winans and the Fisk Jubilee Singers with many more names to be announced in coming weeks. The concert airs live Dec. 31 starting at 8 p.m. ET on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.
Last year’s event drew 220,000 people, with headliners Jelly Roll, Keith Urban and Kane Brown. Past performers have included Aldean, Darius Rucker, Brooks & Dunn, Chris Janson, Jon Pardi and Riley Green. The show features primarily live performances with some taped sets peppered in. It’s the only televised New Year’s Eve network show that focuses solely on country music.
The event is executive produced by Robert Deaton and Mary Hilliard Harrington in partnership with Music City Inc., the foundation of the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp. The special will be directed by Sandra Restrepo.
Deaton and Harrington launched the show in 2022 on CBS as a counterpoint to other New Year’s Eve programming and immediately found the talent community to be enthusiastic. “When I reached out to do talent bookings, so many of the managers and artists were saying the same things,” Deaton told Billboard in 2022, lauding the event highlighting country music and Nashville. With a new format and a new show, you don’t know until you start making the calls. I found out really quickly the artists are behind this show.”
