From day one, we partnered with Playa Luna [Presents],” Bryan tells Billboard. “At the time, they said, ‘Luke, do you
want to just take the money, or do you want to build it and be an owner?’ I was so glad I decided to build it and become an owner, because it’s something I’ll look
back on and it will be one of the proudest things I’ve been a part of. Year one, I’ll never forget when I saw the actual
concert site and looked at how beautiful everything was lit, and how well done. My first thought was, ‘These fans are about to have one of the greatest [four-
day periods] of their life, because everything even exceeded my expectations.”
It’s not only fans who get excited about attending Crash My Playa — the artists do, too.
“Artists will hear about Crash My Playa and how fun it is, and they will walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, can we come be a
part of this?’” Bryan says. “I was doing some TV stuff with Kane [Brown], and he goes, ‘I want to do Crash My Playa,’ and I
said, ‘Well, we can get it organized and booked right now.’ So it’s been fun to kind of be the promoter of my own
festival, but it’s fun when the artists come down and it lives up to their expectations.”
For Bryan, chief among a decade of music-filled, sun-drenched memories he has amassed from previous years of
Crash My Playa are the moments he and his fellow artists have been able to let loose and be comfortable — even if that
means some informal, silly onstage moments.
“I never will forget the year that me, Jason Aldean, Lee Brice and Charles Kelley got onstage,” Bryan recalls. “I had toured with Jason Aldean for many,
many years and I’d never heard him lose his voice, but we all sounded like wolves out in the wild. So that told me maybe
we’d had a little too much tequila down there, but we knew we had had a great time when singers are losing their voices,
trying to do cover songs. But it was a pretty funny moment and thank God it never went viral.”
In addition to music, the concert vacation features an array of sports activities, games, pool parties, wellness activities, and more, with previous years’ activities including ATVs, zip lines, snorkeling, beach volleyball, and a pickleball tournament.
“We’ve always got a big group of friends and family that come down,” Bryan says. “It’s nice to go down there and get in the sun and get your vitamin D and feel good and have some margaritas. So most of the time we just sit there and sit by the pool and play music.
“One time I learned how to windsurf there and that didn’t go well,” he adds with a laugh. “So I gave up windsurfing.”
Notably, despite the ACM Award-nominated event’s continuously surging popularity, package prices remain consistent with last year.
“I want fans to come down there and go, ‘Wow, that was twice as good as we expected and we can’t believe that we got all this for this package [price],’” Bryan noted. “Whenever we’ve had our inputs go up, and wherever we’ve had to spend more money on this or that, I’ve taken it out of my pocket and never transferred it to the fans. I could have raised ticket prices 20% and paid off something else, but we chose not to do it that way. If things get a little more expensive, I take it on the chin, and that just feels like the right way to go about it.”
