Amsterdam Dance Event 2020 Goes Digital: A Conversation With The Festival Directors
The story behind the transition to virtual for the world’s biggest dance music conference.
At this point, calling 2020 an unprecedented year in the music and event space would be both an understatement and a cliché. The global Covid-19 pandemic put a (temporary) end to all concerts, festivals and large gathering of any kind. Some musicians haven’t made a cent in eight months, not to mention promoters, venue owners, bartenders, bouncers and everything in between, as many businesses struggle to stay afloat.
It’s perhaps more important than ever before that the industry’s leading minds come together to discuss, collaborate, even commiserate a little, just to get the ball moving on what we do next. That’s where the Amsterdam Dance Event, the world’s leading electronic music industry conference, comes in.
The five-day annual event usually takes over the streets of The Netherlands capital — the iconic yellow and black becomes unmissable. Every concert hall, club, coffee shop and hotel bar hires a DJ and transforms into a dance floor.
This year, the city-wide conference and concert series — like everything else in the events world — must pivot to digital. But rather than go through the motions and organize a series of livestream DJ sets and a few zoom panels, the ADE team saw an opportunity to expand what the conference can be for years to come. Co-Directors Meindert Kennis and Jan-Willem van de Ven hope that message of innovation shines in all ADE’s programming.
ADE’s team first took Covid-19 seriously in March, as did most of the entertainment world. There was plenty of hope that things might be better by ADE’s mid-October dates. After all, Coachella had rescheduled for that month, but a few days into lockdown in the Netherlands, Kennis and van de Ven realized such hope was unrealistic.
“After a week or two weeks we thought, ‘okay, this is not going well,’” Kennis says. “Still, you don’t know what to expect because you don’t have a crystal ball. We had a period until early June that we started to to brainstorm how would we do it, what were we doing and what will the future look like?”
The team studied the work of other festivals and events, then asked themselves “what is it that makes ADE so unique?”.
To capture the frenzy and opportunity of the real event, the team took a two-pronged approach. On one side, they’d flood the internet with free, quality on-demand video content, and on the other, they’d bring all the industry’s professional minds into one interactive space.
Attendance is likewise broken into two tiers. Video content, concerts, documentaries and the like are free and viewable to anyone who visits the website for the duration of the conference. On the more industry-focused front, a special ADE social network is accessible to pros only via ticket purchase, which guarantees access to the site and its content for a full year — until ADE 2021 rolls around.
“The difference between a real ADE and this one is that we don’t want to recreate a festival,” van de Ven says. “We want you to have this immersive feeling with all kinds of content around electronic music, especially [created and formatted] for on screen.”
Each piece of programming will premiere at a designated time, and fans can watch alongside each other in one ADE-centric main chat. Once each show has premiered, it will be available on-demand until ADE wraps Sunday night, Oct. 25. It is honestly a rather magnificent gratis offering, considering even fans typically pay for concert admittance during the real deal.
Those who do pay gain annual access to ADE Pro, a special social network and meeting site that’s been live for about a week. With the aim of recreating the conference’s very-real gathering of the industry’s elite, the site centers around one main wall of news posts and conversation with the option to search members by company, direct message, and attend in-site video conferences.
The programming for this year is also mindful of the times that we are living in, focusing on three major themes of mental health, activism in music and of course, Covid-19.
Speakers include James Blake on artists and their experiences of depression and anxiety, Femi Kuti and Neneh Cherry on keeping social activism at the heart of their careers, Fieldlab Events on “Roadmapping the Future”, and Montreux Jazz Festival’s Nicolas Bonard on New Opportunities for the Live Industry. These represent but a drop in the ocean of content that will available over the course of the conference.
Read our full interview with ADE’s co-directors now on the Festival Advisor website, and tune into the ADE program this weekend.
