Sheryl Crow, Trey Songz, Cold War Kids and the wild duo of Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi known as Rae Sremmurd are among the 17 artists who will appear on the new season of AT&T's Audience Music Concerts Series which kicks off Friday April 21 on the Audience Network.
Now in its third season, the music show is hosted by Ted Stryker and features exclusive performances and interviews. But after the Tupelo, Mississippi hip-hop duo's fiery show, it wasn't clear if the studio set at Red Studios in Hollywood, where the show is filmed before a live audience, would ever be the same.
"We invited the entire crowd on stage with us and I think we almost broke the stage," Jxmmi told Billboard. "We wanted to give them the full SremmLife experience. It was insane."
This new season line-up, should the stage set again be deemed safe, includes Chris Lane, Daya, Frankie Ballard, Irontom, Korn, Ocean Park Standoff, RaeLynn and William Michael Morgan. Performances will air every Friday at 9:00 p.m on DirectTV, AT&T U-verse and DirecTV Now.
Since the concerts began airing last year, the network has featured 52 artists, including: Mac Miller, Ariana Grande, Ashley Monroe, Fitz and the Tantrums, Hunter Hayes, St. Lucia, AWOLNATION, The Band Perry, JoJo, Bebe Rexha, Kelsea Ballerini, Jason Derulo, Hank Williams, Jr. and Peter Frampton.
The network has also put on major concert events including Taylor Swift Super Saturday (before the Super Bowl) and a Garth Brooks performance.
The Audience Network has more than five million unique viewers per week and ranked within the top 30 of all DIRECTV programming. The channel launch followed AT&T acquisition of DirecTV in July 2014 for $48.5 billion.
The AT&T-DirecTV merger created one of the largest subscription services with DirecTV and U-Verse platforms initially reaching 26 million subscribers. Those numbers could rise drastically should U.S. regulators approve AT&T's bid to acquire Time-Warner Cable in a stock and cash transaction reached last October that valued the entertainment conglomerate at $86 billion.
The combination of AT&T and Time Warner would create a mega media-telecommunications firm even larger than Comcast, the giant cable TV distributor that purchased NBCUniversal five years ago. When the deal was announced, the two biggest market caps among the seven entertainment conglomerates were Comcast at $154 billion and Walt Disney at $150 billion. A combined AT&T-Time Warner would have a market cap of more than $305 billion, making it more valuable than Comcast and Disney combined.
Last month the European Union approved the acquisition.
In AT&T's latest quarterly earning report from January, the company announced it had consolidated revenues of $41.8 billion. The report noted that DirecTV Now launched with more than 200,000 paid net adds and 235,000 U.S. DirecTV satellite net adds.
