The journey of Dutch DJ’s around the world

Bo Plantinga
Sep 2, 2018 · 6 min read
Image from Hardwell’s Twitter account, on his way to Summerburst in Sweden

Being a world class DJ isn’t all about glitter and glamour. I mean, traveling all around the world, tight travel schedules and entertaining thousands of fans throughout the night, that must be exhausting at times. Hence why I started wondering how these travel schedules of the largest EDM acts would look like.

I’m mostly curious about Dutch DJ’s. You may wonder why that’s the case… Well, partly because I’m Dutch, but mostly because of the fact that it has always been fascinating to see how many Dutch DJ’s are listed (high) in the Top 100 ranking of best DJ’s in the world.

With this post I want to try to confirm how exhausting it must be to maintain such a global presence and, since they all have something in common (being Dutch), if we can detect some similarities between all these EDM acts.

The dataset

Before we can dig into the details we need to find ourselves some data. A short description of the dataset can be find below;

  • Our starting point is DJ Mag’s Top 100 ranking of DJ’s, globally. From that list we need to separate all the Dutch DJ’s from other nationalities. This is simply done by some old fashioned Wikipedia investigation.
  • From there on we need to find all the tour data related to all the individual artists, for which we can consult songkick.com. The dataset includes show dates from January 2017 until August 2018. We do not know if additional travelling happened during shows and breaks, for the sake of this analysis we assume that an artist travels from show to show and we stick with the Songkick schedule. The dataset contains 2500 shows and 70 countries.
Hardwell’s journey around the world

Up in the air

Clearly all the DJ’s spent quite some time up in the air, likely seeing more places than you and I could dream of. By calculating the distance between the cities on the tour schedule and keeping their tour sequence in consideration we can calculate the travelled distance. This can be done by taking the geographical coordinates of cities, called Latitude and Longitude.

Tiësto is by far the one who has travelled most, with a stunning 500K miles behind him. The runner up is Sam Feldt, with Nicky Romero just a couple of miles behind him

Artists on the bottom of the list are the ones that seem to have more shows close to home (mostly Europe). It’s fair to say though that these artists are more likely to operate in a niche of EDM or are in their initial phase of their career, compared to others who might be further ahead.

The average amount of hours on a plane is 365 hours which is an equivalent of 15 days. Martin Garrix spent approximately 450 hours on a plane, Armin van Buuren spent around 380 hours up in the air and Angerfist spent 115 hours travelling.

Miles travelled vs. amount of shows

As the average distance travelled per DJ is a whopping 200.000 miles you can imagine that there’s quite some planning involved. I wondered if we can see if some artists managed to plan their tour schedule more efficient than others.

Efficiency is a good quality to have as a DJ (or as person really), and you get to save the planet (just a bit more) than your competing DJ friends. If you’re flying from Amsterdam to Hong Kong, back to Italy and thereafter to Osaka you might want to shift around a bit with your tour dates to save some jet fuel.

Martin Garrix’ journey around the world

When looking at artists that travelled over 200,000 miles (you want to exclude the ones that barely travel compared to the ones that do) we conclude that Headhunterz does their planning quite well and has the highest efficiency score of 0.34. Oliver Heldens and Sam Feldt are the runner up with an efficiency score of 0.33. This means that while they are on the road, they tend to take more shows in the same area than other DJ’s might do.

Collecting air miles

Though some DJ’s take certain flights on private jets I thought it would be fun to calculate an estimate of the amount of air miles they would collect if they were to have flown all flights with an airline that offers a frequent flyer program.

As we concluded earlier, Tiësto has flown the most and therefore collected the most fictive air miles obviously. But did you know that these fictive air miles would be the equivalent of 49 round trips to Tokyo travelling from Amsterdam?

fictive collected air miles

Yellow Claw accumilated enough miles to go on a shopping spree in NYC for 42 times. Martin Garrix is able to watch the sun set at the beautiful beaches of Lima, for 25 times. There aren’t enough weeks in a year for Bassjackers to cash out their miles to weekly Barcelona flights, and I wonder if Cape Town is still fun after being able to visit for 37 times, Don Diablo?

Furthermore, these were not just your regular coach flights… no, the real deal, business class tickets including champagne.

Seeing the world

One of the pro’s of flying so often is that you get to see the world. The visualisation below shows the acitivity of Dutch DJ’s in North America — popular destinations in the United States are Las Vegas, Miami, Dallas, Chicago and Hollywood.

Dutch DJ activity in North America

The top countries where the DJ’s travel most are;

  1. United States
  2. The Netherlands
  3. Germany
  4. China
  5. Spain

There are a couple of countries that only appeared once in the dataset and are quite noteworthy, like Nepal where Bassjackers went, Mongolia where Fedde le Grand paid a visit and Quintino who travelled all the way to Ethiopia.

Catching some rest

Flying is exhausting, and so is entertaining a crowd in the middle of the night. I therefore wondered what months would be best to spend some well earned air miles on a luxurious holiday. The graph below shows the average amount of shows a DJ has per month. Not surprisingly, spring and summer are peak season. Though it differs per DJ, on average the most favourable months to take a break are November through January.

Average amount of shows per month

Disclaimer

  • Tour data is based on public/available data on Songkick’s platform. Events might be missing or incorrectly submitted.
  • The miles calculation is based on the tour sequence and does not consider the artist flying elsewhere between shows. To calculated the awards miles an average ticket price has been used. Calculations are done with latitude and longitude measures. Hours on a plane are calculated with a Boeing 777’s cruising altitude.
  • Festivals are often held at locations that large data sets aren’t familiar with. If that was the case I linked the event to the nearest larger city that appeared in the worldwide city database. E.g., Boom (Tomorrowland’s residency) has been linked to Antwerp.
  • Yes, I am familiar with the DJ Mag discussions. ;-)

Bo Plantinga

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