How Tomorrowland changed the perception of electronic dance festivals
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Music festivals have been taking the world by storm for decades. Music enthusiasts are traveling for hours to reach the unique destination to feel the festival vibe and see their favorite artists perform on massive stages. There are thousands of music festivals around the world & we picked a few that stole our hearts this year.
Not only are we reviewing some of the highlights from this year’s hottest festival, we are taking things a step further with an in-depth analysis of Tomorrowland that will blow your mind.
Tomorrowland is changing and here is how
The last two weekends of July were filled with joy in Belgium for sure. The 185,000 tickets were sold out in less than an hour. With breathtaking stages and amazing international EDM superstars, Tomorrowland is on the bucket list of many.
By the looks of previous years, Tomorrowland always picked top electronic dance music artists. But this year they added a little more than just EDM. A little bit of sugar with reggae star Rakka, a little bit of spice with 7 pop artists, including Dua Lipa, and a little more with 13 hip-hop artists including Lil Pump, French Montana, DJ Jazzy Jeff and many more.
But the biggest surprise of all was definitely the Latin hip-hop star Bad Bunny. Even though he was not on the announced line up, he joined the stage with Alesso to sing the “I like it” song.
With 726 artists from 41 countries over the 2 weekends, Tomorrowland is certainly worth the visit. Nervo, Timmy Trumpet and other artists from Australia traveled more than 14,000 km to play their best sets for the people of Tomorrowland. There were almost 300 local artists from Belgium and the Netherlands.
Genres of Tomorrowland
Even though Tomorrowland is focused on electronic music, there was almost 2% of Hip-Hop and 1% of pop artists. When it came to the electronic subgenres, there was a huge increase of dubstep, drum&bass and hardstyle artists taking almost 13% of the lineup. The big winner is still house with 33,3% and EDM with 22,9%. But techno and trance are right behind with 18,9% and 11,1%. Trap music is changing the industry of electronic music fast and that is shown on the Tomorrowland lineup as well with 6 artists performing at the event.
It seems like drum&bass is the most popular genre between artists from UK and Belgium, while hardstyle is mostly performed by Dutch DJs.
Tomorrowland always aimed high with their lineup, and this year was not any different. They picked 37 artists from the Top 100 electronic chart. On their stages, they hosted 6 out of 10 best techno DJs in the world including Carl Cox, Adam Beyer, Paul Kalkbrenner, Richie Hawtin, Nina Kraviz and Boris Brejcha.
And the biggest winner of Tomorrowland is…
Salvatore Gannaci stole the show! After his crazy performance at Tomorrowland, his video went viral which is clearly shown on the charts. He jumped for 6,533 spots on the Viberate chart and gained half of his followers (50,000) in just a week.
Awakenings has it all
The festival started as a one-day event 21 years ago in the Netherlands, a country where electronic music is dominating the chart. On our Top 25 Netherlands chart, there are only three performers from another genre. Check it out.
Between so many amazing artists at the 8 enormous stages, you need to make a good schedule plan to see all the acts you want. So, for example, Joseph Capriati, Maceo Plex, Pan-Pot and Len Faki were all scheduled at the same time. Would you decide the same way our followers did?
Something for everyone
In the middle of July, the entire city of Novi Sad in Serbia transformed into a city of the Exit festival. At a unique location inside the fortress, the “Best European Major Festival” hosted more than 1,000 acts including trap sensation Migos, Jamaican reggae superstar Ziggy Marley and Grace Jones at the main stage, and had another ace in its sleeve. Electronic music lovers were gathering at the Dance arena to see the biggest acts of the moment such as Maceo Plex, Nina Kraviz, Ben Klock and many more.
On the other side of the globe…
Japan’s fabulous Fuji Rock is happening at the Ski Resort each year. More than 125,000 people attended this year’s edition, where the lineup combined some 60's legends and hip-hop superstars. Here’s is what fans were looking forward to the most:
By the way, Post Malone got a “warm welcome” for his first performance in Japan. One of his fans threw a shoe on the stage, and this is what happened…
Festival guide for this month
This time, our head of the database team and music scientist Nik handpicked the best festivals in August around the world. Since we are in the final stages of the beta testing of our newest tool to discover unique party experiences tailored to your taste, the app might be the one to help you with this instead.
