Every year, over half a million music fans flock to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway for three nights to dance under neon lights to tunes spanning almost every imaginable dance music subgenre. While Electric Daisy Carnival just wrapped its 29th year, it somehow still finds ways to reinvent itself and grow — not just grow in crowd size, but in cultural and physical reach.
Just before opening the gates to the festival on May 16, the event’s producer Insomniac invited select guests to Hotel EDC at the Virgin Hotel to celebrate their latest international expansion. Partygoers celebrated with Gorgon City to highlight Insomniac’s next international destination, Medellín, where EDC Colombia will launch in October 2026.
Inside the festival, we saw more representation on the lineup via the Ubutu stage, which created a dedicated space for Afro-house for the first time in the festival’s 29-year run. This year the fest also added a dinner theater activation where guests were treated to a cocktail hour with an acrobatic showcase, followed by dinner featuring a dance troupe and ending with dessert and live singing.
With the festival approaching its 30th year, Billboard spoke to a handful of DJs, from legendary headliners to this year’s first-timers, to hear from their perspective on how EDC continues to grow and how they personally make each year better than the last.
Here are seven takeaways from their words of wisdom.
Even Legends Can Reach New Heights
Tiësto is without a doubt one of the biggest names in dance music. He’s played EDC every year since the festival moved from California to Las Vegas in 2011. You would think he’s turned every possible stone the fest has to offer, but this year, the legend was excited to play Circuit Grounds, a fan-favorite stage, for the first time. Circuit Grounds offers more screens to visually bring the audience into new and unexpected tracks like Tiësto’s upcoming collaboration with Sexyy Red on the F1 soundtrack, “OMG!” Backstage the artist rhetorically asked us “Who would have thought Tiësto would have collabed with Sexyy Red?… No one. Absolutely no one. And it’s an amazing track.”
Also bringing the unexpected this year was EDM titan Kaskade. He brought his b2b act with Alison Wonderland to the Cosmic Meadow stage after the artists debuted as a duo at EDC Orlando last year. This time around, they expanded their sound to include some of Wonderland’s signature trap tunes. “For me, it’s just about playing stuff we love and trying to figure out that bridge in between,” Kaskade told us. “We’ve only played a handful of shows so we’re still discovering that as we play out more together.”
Everything Old Can Be New
When you’ve played EDC for as long as Tiësto and Kaskade, who’s performed at the festival for two decades, you have to continue making changes to your solo sets. Tiësto reserved a special set for the mainstage, closing out the three-day festival with a set that saw a return to his trance roots. Rising German producer Marlon Hoffstadt introduced “The Godfather of Trance” before his In Search of Sunrise Set, named after his legendary 1999 compilation album.
Tiësto told us the time was finally right for such a moment, saying “I reconnected with the sound I started with back in the day, and I feel like it’s a full circle moment. When [Insomniac Events founder] Pasquale [Rotella] asked me ‘Will you do a sunrise set?’ and I thought ‘Yeah, the time is right now.’”
For Kaskade, his solo set was sprinkled with pieces of his decades-old hits. Many DJs’ styles evolve over time, and Kaskade says he still struggles trying to resurface his former fan-favorites but admits, “People online will like this. There’s sometimes when there’s somebody hitting me up like ‘You haven’t played this song in 10 years!’ and I’m like ‘Oh yeah. That is a good song. I should remember to bring that out.’” So, if you’re waiting for more tracks from his 2008 album Strobelite Seduction to make it into his next set, like us, keep posting.
The Bright Lights Never Dull
The electric sky still shines just as bright, if not brighter, almost 30 years later. Alison Wonderland is still amazed at the impact that EDC has had on her and her friends after playing the festival 10 years later. She reflected on her first time playing at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway and crying, telling the audience “I started in my bedroom and now I’m here.”
A decade later, she’s still humbled by her EDC experience saying that she can’t believe she is sharing the stage with Kaskade. But there’s nothing that could prevent her from taking the stage at the Electric Daisy Carnival. “In fact, I actually love EDC so much that at 9 months pregnant I played main stage,” she said of this set that happened in 2023.
The Power of Planning
With over 500,000 people attending the festival every year, it’s the perfect opportunity for an artist to not only reach their fans but also expose themselves to a group of people who have potentially never heard their sound. Just ask Ben Nicky.
We caught up with the British producer 10 minutes after his first set at Kinetic Field on Saturday night before he made his way to Neon Garden for a b2b set with Maddix. Walking into his trailer, he was already on his computer working on a track because he’s aware of how every set offers its own opportunities.
“I’m like a DJ’s DJ,” he said. “I’m always changing something. Mainstage you’ve got your big fanbase there, but you’ve got another fifty to sixty thousand people who might not know you or be more into commercial stuff. So, you have to tailor and play more well-known vocals. Whereas in the trance tent, I can get away with more dark and underground stuff.”
Ben meticulously tweaks every element to fit the crowd he’s trying to appeal to, and the crowd at EDC is some of the most knowledgeable when it comes to dance music. Brazilian star Alok told Billboard that means you can’t phone it in.
“I feel like people here each year are more and more educated,” he said, “so, it’s not easy to please them. So you really have to bring stuff that makes sense and not obvious.” He knows a thing or two about keeping an audience on their toes. He just had a buzzed-about Coachella performance, for which he hired dancers with two-tone arms to create eye-catching live visuals.
Don’t Forget to Live in the Moment
While some DJs meticulously plan their sets, others prefer to “just rip it” in the words of Tape B. He started playing EDC in Orlando while doing his undergrad in Florida. Now that he’s worked his way up to EDC Las Vegas, he attended a programming meeting for the first time ahead of his solo set on Friday. When it came to his joint set with dubstep super DJ, Crankdat, they planned to start their set with their unreleased collab but keep it loose otherwise.
He told Billboard about the planning that went into the set saying, “Met up with Crankdat. Worked on our back-to-back for a little bit. Got songs kinda together. We’re mainly freestyling it tonight. So, it’s going to be very interesting, but very fun.”
Unreleased Tracks Make Everyone Happy
One of the most exciting aspects of attending EDC Las Vegas is the massive amount of unreleased music you’ll hear. REZZ said she was most excited to give fans a taste of what direction she’s taking her project next. “I’m super excited for this year. I’m playing like, seven new songs, more than half of which I’ve never played before.” Check TikTok to see fans’ live reactions to some of this new music.
It’s become customary for DJs to head to Las Vegas with a ton of unreleased music. Riot Ten used it as a chance to treat his most dedicated fans to an early listen of his new album, Requiem For a Riot, before it drops in a week. Other artists may opt to test out some tracks they’re workshopping to see how the crowd reacts, like DJ Snake who played his upcoming song “Paradise” for the audience at AYU dayclub, not once, but twice, to make sure it went off every time.
There Are No Small Opportunities
With this year’s addition of the Ubutu stage, Afro-house had a major presence at the festival for the first time. Francis Mercier noted that EDC is “the home to different types of music from hip-hop to dubstep to house to now Afro house. It’s a place where you can hear all different types of music.” This new stage opened the door for artists like Karaba, who hails from Montreal, Canada, to play a stage at EDC Las Vegas for the first time.
Making the most of these opportunities is key, according to Morten. His first time playing the fest was in 2016 when he thought no one would see him spinning at one of the art cars. When he took the stage he was surprised by the energy. “It doesn’t matter what stage you’re at, the party and the crowd is incredible.” Since then, he’s played solo sets, b2b with David Guetta and this year played Kinetic Field with Artbat.
If you really want to see how quickly you can ascend to greatness, you just have to look at Cloonee’s trajectory. He admitted that EDC wasn’t really a festival you thought about as someone who grew up in England. After living in the States for a few months, he found himself nervously playing the Stereo Bloom festival back in 2022. This year he played Circuit Grounds right after Tiësto,z who said he wasn’t going to play Cloonee’s hit song “Stephanie” with InntRaw and Young M.A because it would be this year’s most played song and you don’t play the most played song before its creator takes the stage.
Meanwhile, the advice Cloonee would give himself before playing Stereo Bloom in 2022 is, “Calm down because you’ve got bigger ones to do.”
Catch more of Billboard’s EDC Las Vegas coverage on Billboard’s Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Channels.