Maroon 5 to Headline Super Bowl Halftime Show

A band will once again take the stage at the Super Bowl halftime show.

The pop group Maroon 5 is scheduled to headline the annual 13-minute extravaganza this February at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Ga., according to two sources familiar with the plan who were not authorized to speak on the record.

The N.F.L. said in a statement: “It’s a Super Bowl tradition to speculate about the performers for the Pepsi Halftime Show. We are continuing to work with Pepsi on our plans but do not have any announcements to make on what will be another epic show.”

Super Bowl LIII (or 53) will be played on Feb. 3, 2019, and broadcast by CBS.

Maroon 5, led by the singer Adam Levine, who moonlights as a coach on NBC’s reality singing competition “The Voice,” currently has the No. 2 song on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Girls Like Us,” featuring the rapper Cardi B. Since 2002, the Los Angeles band has released six albums, each of which has gone platinum, including “Red Pill Blues” last year. The group’s best known singles include “She Will Be Loved,” “This Love,” “Payphone,” “Moves Like Jagger” and “Don’t Wanna Know,” featuring Kendrick Lamar.

In a 2015 interview with Howard Stern, Mr. Levine said that the band was on a “short list” to play the halftime show, adding, “we very actively want to play the Super Bowl.”

This year’s show was headlined by Justin Timberlake, who had previously been a part of Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” in 2004. A critic for The New York Times called his return to the stage “heavy on dance spectacle, light on vocal authority” and noted that it “sounded as if Mr. Timberlake were merely providing accent riffs to his own songs.” He was preceded in 2017 by Lady Gaga, who also performed solo, and in 2016 by Coldplay, the last band to appear, with spotlight-stealing cameos from Beyoncé and Bruno Mars.

Mr. Timberlake’s halftime show had ratings down 9 percentfrom the year prior. The most-watched halftime show featured Katy Perry and her dancing sharks in 2015, with an audience of 120.7 million.

(Excerpt) Read more in: The New York Times

Maroon 5 to Headline Super Bowl Halftime Show

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