China’s music festival market has exploded in recent years, with events encompassing rock, jazz, EDM, and more being held across the country almost every week of the year. The traditional period for festivals has always been the public holiday to mark International Labor Day however, and so this week’s photo theme is China Music Festivals. We’ll be bringing you shots from some of this season’s major music fests — traversing punk, jazz, pop, and electronic music.
In 2013, Shanghai-founded promotional company A2Live launched Storm Festival, a two-day DJ-centric event that was essentially the country’s first EDM festival. There had been plenty of alternative electronic music events before that of course, but nothing quite with this mix of crazy narrative (Storm’s was about a party-loving alien invasion), outlandish stages, and mainstream EDM DJ names.
Five years later, and there are EDM festivals popping up all over the country. Ultra — the massive Miami dance fest — made its entry into Mainland China last year and will return again in 2018 with events in both Beijing and Shanghai; Belgium’s Daydream made its debut in Shanghai in mid-April; New York-based Electric Zoo also came to town in 2016; and the UK’s long-running Creamfields brand is in the midst of taking festivals and spin-off shows to cities across the country.
edc China 2018
This past weekend, the big EDM fest in Shanghai was Electric Daisy Carnival, better known as edc, which made its first entrance into the Mainland China market with a Martin Garrix and Deadmau5-headlined event out by Shanghai Disneyland. The Shanghai version featured much of the same Daisy Age appropriating imagery as its Las Vegas namesake, as the short QQ video below shows:
Photos: edc China
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