I just attended EDC 2024 in Las Vegas, and it was hands down the best music festival experience of my life, so I want to write about why I loved it so much! The overarching themes I’ve identified after thinking about it are crowd demographic, culture, venue, and vibes/dancing. For some background, while I have been to over a dozen concerts, I have been to only three festivals prior to EDC 2024: Outside Lands 2022 (San Francisco), Outside Lands 2023, and Kilby Block Party 2024 (Salt Lake City).
The first thing that elevated EDC for me is the type of person that visits and what they have to deal with to even attend. The first barrier of entry is that EDC is pretty out of the way; most everyone is flying in or driving quite a distance and the raceway that the event is held at isn’t near the Las Vegas strip; it’s an hour shuttle ride away. This is different from Outside Lands, for example, which is close to a highly populated area with a large permanent population (as opposed to Vegas, which is mostly populated by tourists), so a decent chunk of OSL attendees are either San Francisco or Bay Area residents. Second, EDC is very specifically catered to electronic music, so I would imagine that the majority of people attend out of dedication to the genre and love of the music itself. I’ll mention it more when I bring up culture, but I really did feel the passion of the crowd, which made me feel super immersed.
Going back to the shuttle for a second because I found it to be a fun little situation: while the shuttle system didn’t generally cause problems, on our first day getting to EDC our bus had some issue that didn’t allow the driver to turn on the AC. That meant that it became a bus full of 100 people full-body sweating as the Vegas sun beat down on us through the massive shuttle windows, creating a literal sauna. This didn’t discourage us from having a blast on Day 1 though :)
A third feature of EDC that lends it to having a particular kind of attendee is that it is a night festival. The first performances begin at 7pm and the last ones end at around 5:15am at sunrise. Every day we end up getting back home at around 9am and waste the entire day catching up on sleep, lounging, and attempting to mentally recover up until 6pm rolls around and it’s time to catch the next shuttle. Because of the hours, during the festival I really needed to focus on energy management. I had to make sure to eat, hydrate, and took an energy drink either around 9pm or midnight so that I would still be alert for the closing performance. The downside of this strategy is that I then had a problem sleeping during the day time because of the late caffeine intake. In fact, as far as I’m aware, I only had six actual hours of sleep over 72 hours: three on Saturday morning, zero Sunday morning, and three Monday morning. That said, I personally have problems sleeping outside of my normal hours so I knew I would be running on low sleep going into this.
The night time hours, in addition to the travel/proximity and music points I brought up earlier, ultimately mean that this is not a festival for more casual music listeners - if you are the average person who listens to the global Top 100 songs, I would imagine you are less likely to attend EDC. So, I would say this festival is not for the weak-willed. Or, really, at least for me I would not attend and put up with all of the above if I didn’t love the music as much as I do, and I’m extrapolating the same to the other festival-goers.
Another benefit, which isn’t core to the festival itself but bears mentioning because it still made EDC a supremely enjoyable experience, was the weather. Because we were out in the desert at night time, the temperature was truly perfect; I was in a t-shirt and shorts every day, never needing to carry around a jacket. In San Francisco for Outside Lands I had to be ready for all kinds of weather, which is simply an annoyance more than anything. Meanwhile in Salt Lake City for Kilby Block Party we got caught in a truly insane storm that ended the festival early and completely soaked everyone beyond belief.
The rave/electronic music culture is another major reason why I loved EDC. To start with, most everyone is dressed up in some unique or interesting or fun manner; there were tons of colorful shirts and coordinated group outfits (a lot of our group did a Pokemon theme). Props are also a big deal; many people bring flags of various kinds and messages, along with home-made banners that also have messages or some fun theme. A lot of the banners light up, so it’s really cool to see so much neon in the crowd alongside the lasers that are emitted as a part of the stage. It’s really impressive how far people go with creating their custom outfits and props, and seeing how much people care about the experience makes it so fun to be in the crowd. The sea of flags and banners is a testament to how many of those people are out there!
My favorite part of the culture is Kandi-exchanges through PLUR. PLUR stands for Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect, and Kandi is basically bracelets that you home-make before the festival which have any sort of design, pattern, or message. Before I go into more details, I also wanted to say that making Kandi with friends the day of was so fun - being able to communally prep for the festival heightened my anticipation. Back to Kandi: the purpose of Kandi is not just decoration for your own arms, but also to share with others! If you are vibing with anyone in the crowd or simply feel like it, you can give them a Kandi (and they also may give one back to you). PLUR is relevant because it is the mechanism by which I exchange Kandi to you. First, we both throw up peace signs and I touch my peace sign to yours (peace). Second, we each throw up half of a heart and touch those together (love). Third, I clasp my hand into yours (unity). Finally, with hands still clasped, I transfer my Kandi onto your wrist. If you choose to do so, you transfer one of yours to my wrist. And that’s it! It felt a bit silly the first time I heard about it, but it really was a nice bonding experience, especially when I had prepared Kandi with relevant messaging, such as “You are a vibe” and song and artist names of artists whose sets I would be attending, and when others did the same. For example, I was wearing a shirt with a watermelon pattern, so a random person walked up to me and gave me a Kandi with a watermelon design! Also, on the first day I was wandering away from my group to check out other random stages, so my friend gave me a Kandi that says “Wanderer” :) This is the first festival I’ve ever been to that has this kind of culture, and I’m sad knowing that I’ll be attending future festivals that lack this aspect of the experience.
The third big thing that I loved was vibes of the festival itself and of the crowd. One thing that was immediately noticeable upon arrival was the sheer scale of both venue and people. There are three or four main stages, along with around four medium stages and several more smaller stages - and by small I mean truly small. I believe they’re called “art cars” and really aren’t much bigger than a couple of actual cars - so people were dispersed across all of the festival grounds, there was always music blasting in every corner, and I always had several artists to choose from. The main stages are quite long but also very wide, so the area allotted to each is more than enough to accommodate everyone. That’s a good thing because there were so. many. people. Wikipedia says that daily attendance is an average of ~170,000 people, and I could feel that whenever needing to leave one stage for another or simply doing a 360 spin to observe the crowd around me. At the same time, even with such a large attendance, we always had enough space to dance, no matter how close or far from the stage we were. While part of this is due to the size of the stages, I also believe part of it is culture, as I’ve observed at EDM concerts that people do not push very much and often leave enough personal space. This is a far cry from some of the experiences I’ve had at the other festivals, where I felt the stages were not wide enough so for really popular artists that commanded a larger crowd, people would push like crazy, packing all of us like sardines because they didn’t want to be stuck in the back. This leads me into another fantastic thing I observed about EDC: the artist themselves are not the main attraction. I believe that the music being the focal point is a conscious decision made by the organizers because while the stages always had massive screens, those screens most often did not show a live broadcast of the DJ. As such, I as a crowd member focused on the music, experience, and relationship I had with my friends and group around me, in a certain sense forgetting about the performers. In terms of space, this was helpful because it meant we and others could still have a fantastic experience from the back and so less people are pushing to be in the front, meaning everyone has space to dance. The only artist that I asked my group to go closer to the stage for was Fred Again, and even then we did not go to the closest stage barrier; we were fine about 25% of the way there. All of this meant that the actual experience of being in the crowd was almost always pleasant.
But it’s not just that being in the crowd was pleasant; I think my single favorite thing from the entire festival was the vibe of the crowd - they were incredibly fun and immersive because of the movement! Basically all of the music, no matter which sub-genre of electronic, is meant to get you moving in some way. Whether it’s the head-banging of dub-step or body-swaying and head bobbing of house, or dancing and jumping of EDM, there’s movement. This could be just selection bias, but I really did feel that people around me were, for every performance, vibing harder than at any other festival and most concerts I’ve been to. Not everyone will be moving around at all times, but I felt the proportion of people dancing was way higher than I’ve been used to. Enough people were bobbing heads, swinging their body, dancing, or jumping such that being in the crowd felt like a proper communal experience. I attribute this phenomenon to a combination of all the positive features of EDC and electronic music I’ve mentioned so far, from the music itself to the space you have around you to the culture to the type of people there. Finally, there was something completely fucking magical about dancing in the dark for eight hours until, finally, the light peeks through the horizon and we’re still dancing. The songs I listen to always talk about dancing til the sunrise, and I finally got to experience it. It was a truly moving.
So yeah, that’s why I loved EDC and why it was so different from anything else I’ve experienced. I will cherish the last three days forever. Til next year :)
The sets I saw ~