Is Tomorrowland leading the way of Music Festivals?
In a year in which the pandemic has put the music industry upside down and has paralyzed all festivals, once the initial shock was over Tomorrowland got creative and ended up doing something that has been one of the few things that have positively surprised me this year. Given the impossibility of carrying out the festival as planned, the Belgian festival adapted to the global situation and devised a very interesting virtual edition that today, just when this fateful year is finally ending, they’re repeating again for a New Year's Eve special edition.
Tomorrowland Around The World was the name given to the digital 3D edition of the Belgian festival. Taking place on July 25 and Sunday July 26, Tomorrowland brought together a bunch of big names in electronic dance music and the world’s best technology in 3D design, video production and special effects.
The numbers of such a thing are simply impressive and they are definitely not available to everyone. In addition to its own employees, Tomorrowland also collaborated with the most talented developers to get the digital festival ready in time. The development of such a project usually takes almost 2 years, but thanks to a team of around 200 people, the digital edition of the festival was ready in just 3 months. They built 4 different large green screen studios (all of them had the same full sized DJ booth -8m x 8m x 6m-) in Belgium (Boom), USA (Los Angeles), Brazil (São Paulo) and Australia (Sydney), and more than 60 artists recorded their performances in those studios, including Katy Perry, David Guetta, Martin Garrix, Steve Aoki, Tiësto, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, Eric Prydz, Charlotte de Witte, Amelie Lens, Paul Kalkbrenner and many more. To film the shows, they used 6 4K Ultra HD cameras, and 32 virtual cameras that were created per stage, allowing the director to choose up to 38 cameras during the recordings.
As a result, more than 1 million people worldwide tuned in to the very first digital edition of Tomorrowland. Not bad, and the invention must have given benefits, because tonight they repeat format with an edition to close the year 2020.
Tomorrowland festival, despite not being a very long-lived festival (it was first held in 2005), in recent years it has been carrying out marketing campaigns that other festivals would do well in studying carefully. Thanks to those campaigns, in addition to the thousands of people who attend the festival each year, there are many more around the world dreaming of one day being able to go to the festival. There will never be anything like experiencing a music festival in person, but with 8,500 million people in the world, to imagine the potential audience of the festivals by complementing - and even enhancing - the physical edition with a virtual one of which tickets are also sold, it has almost no limits.
I believe the magic of a music festival is to gather people together in communion with music, but in the absence of it in this unforgettable 2020, Tomorrowland seems to have led the way by offering all its fans the opportunity to enjoy a unique digital experience.
Discover more about Tomorrowland and find tickets for tonight’s New Year's Eve special edition by visiting its official website.
Cover photograph by Tomorrowland’s press.
