Monster Energy Up & Up Festival has locked in SIDEPIECE as its headliner for spring 2025.
The Grammy-nominated house duo, comprising party-starting DJs NITTI and Party Favor and known for their chart-topping hits like “On My Mind” and “Together,” will perform on five winning college campuses in the latest edition of the nation’s largest and longest-running college music tour.
“We’ve been on tour after tour since we started SIDEPIECE, and unfortunately never had enough time in our schedules to hit the colleges,” the pair said in a joint statement. “We’re changing that in 2025! We’ve partnered with Monster Energy Up & Up Festival to headline some insane events around the country.”
Up & Up has no pre-determined dates or route. Instead, the tour calls on over 85 college student ambassador teams across the country to compete to earn their school a stop on the tour. Each campus crew fires up its classmates for a 48-hour pre-sale ticket sell-off with guerilla marketing and influencer campaigns.
The five schools with the most pre-sale tickets sold at the end of the competition win a stop on the tour. The winning ambassador teams then collaborate with Up & Up producers to bring the festival series to a nearby venue, assembling their own bookings, content teams, and parties in the build-up to the end-of-semester bash.
Since its first campus party in the fall of 2016, Monster Energy Up & Up Festival has revamped the college concert experience, eliminating middle buyers and offering college students internship credit, and valuable industry experience in music business, sales, and event production as they curate shows with top artists.
“Joining the Up & Up Festival as an ambassador was one of the best choices I made throughout my college career,” said Ellie Lima, a senior at San Diego State who helped bring a special Levity show to the school earlier this month. “It is a community at its core—surrounded by people who are innovative, creative and driven.”
Monster Up & Up’s Spring 2025 competition will begin on February 24 at 4PM ET. Winning shows will be held in April and June.
College students who want to bring a festival to their school should apply at upandupfestival.com.
Featured image courtesy: SIDEPIECE.
