On Dec. 31, Brooks & Dunn, Kelsea Ballerini, Little Big Town and Zac Brown Band will help count down to 2023 as they lead the return of New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash on CBS. The show will air beginning at 8 p.m. ET and will also be available to stream live and on demand on Paramount+.
Last year’s inaugural event — which featured performances from Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley, Miranda Lambert and more — peaked with 5.51 million viewers in the midnight hour. Like the previous year’s celebration, New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash will be held at various locations in downtown Nashville. Additional artist appearances will be revealed at a later date.
Nashville has painstakingly assembled a five-hour New Year’s celebration that features nearly 50 performances from locations throughout Music City, including the event’s main stage, located at Nashville’s Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park. The broadcast will span multiple time zones, with the traditional countdown at midnight ET, concluding with the dramatic finale of Nashville’s Music Note Drop and fireworks at midnight CT.
The show is executive produced by Robert Deaton (longtime producer for the Country Music Association’s television properties) and Mary Hilliard Harrington (manager for artists including Dierks Bentley and Elle King) in partnership with the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp, and is directed by Sandra Restrepo.
Of last year’s inaugural show, Jack Sussman (executive vice president, specials, music, live events & alternative programming, CBS) told Billboard, “We are going for that big-time network audience in the middle of America, [that] loves country music and loves good music. We have some of the biggest artists in country music on our stage on that night. Quite honestly, there’s some of the biggest artists in music. … People want to watch these people. They want to hear them.”