Las Vegas Songwriters Festival wraps its second year at Mandalay Bay

The Las Vegas Songwriters Festival returned to the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino for its second annual edition last weekend, closing out a four-stage run built entirely around the people who write country hits rather than the people who sing them.

The event opened on Thursday, August 20 at House of Blues Las Vegas with David Lee Murphy, Craig Campbell and Jerrod Niemann. Between them they played their own chart records and songs they have written for Kenny Chesney, Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan, Garth Brooks and Blake Shelton.

Matt Warren hosted. The festival was founded by Rob Hatch and Mike Every of Entersong in partnership with MGM Resorts, which is what puts a writers-round format inside a Strip casino rather than in the Nashville rooms where the model started.

The rest of the weekend ran roughly 40 writers across four stages, among them Dean Dillon, Bob DiPiero, Marti Frederiksen, Eric Paslay, Rebecca Lynn Howard, Carolyn Dawn Johnson, Bridgette Tatum, Jamie Floyd, Jim McCormick, Ray Fulcher and Wynn Varble.

That bench is the point. A songwriter festival sells the story behind a hit, and a bill this deep gives an audience several dozen of them in a weekend without needing a headline artist to carry the ticket.

Details for the 2027 edition will be announced later. The event is logged on the festival tracker, and it sits alongside other country writing-room news this year, including Taylor Swift's induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.