Belgian mega-festival Tomorrowland has finished the drip-feed of artists and stages in its 2016 first phase announcement, adding a further two stages and eight big names to the heavyweight roster already announced.
Five Festivals That Could Replace Future in Australia
Today we were shocked to learn that this year’s Future Music Festival was the last. Here are five festivals which we reckon have got a chance at taking Future’s place in the festival roster.
Ultra Music Festival
Two years ago the UMF TV Twitter feed set the heart of many local dance fans aflutter when it apparently confirmed that Ultra would make its Australian debut “in 2014”. Two years later and Ultra still hasn’t made its move – but we know that a one-day Ultra is coming to Bali this year, and with the amount of interest in the annual three-day Miami festival, it seems crazy that Ultra hasn’t moved on Australian shores already.
Festivals in Croatia, Japan, Korea, Bali, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Buenos Aires and Ibiza have already joined the Miami mothership – we’d be pretty happy to see an antipodean dot appear on that Ultra Worldwide map.
Electric Daisy Carnival
Last month we broke the story that US festival giant Insomniac is locked in a messy legal battle in Australia and the USA over the ownership of its flagship brand Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC). The trademark dispute in Australia is still going back and forth – does that mean that we’ll see Australia added to Las Vegas, New York and the UK when the legal battle finally ends? We can only hope.
Tomorrowland
ID&T’s annual Belgian mega-festival Tomorrowland became so spectacularly successful, they were able to expand to the US with TomorrowWorld in 2013 – and as the US offshoot enters its third year of steady growth, could ID&T be eyeing off an expansion to Australia next? Now that they have the buying power of events giant SFX behind them, we wouldn’t rule it out entirely. (Plus they’ve already expanded to Brazil.)
Lollapalooza
Australian festival icon Big Day Out was bought by US festival company C3 Presents (now part of Live Nation) in 2014, before being unceremoniously retired. C3 Presents also owns Lollapalooza, among other festival brands, and the cross-genre festival giant will make its European debut this year, with a one-day festival in Berlin this September. Could there be an Australian Lollapalooza on the cards for 2016? It’d be a pretty decent bet.
HOLY SHIP!
We can but only dream…
