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CRSSD Fall books 46 artists, and 37 of them play somewhere else this season

We ran CRSSD Fall through the Scene Index. The interesting number isn't the lineup size. It's how much of that lineup is also billed 500 miles north on the same weekend.

CRSSD Fall runs 26–27 September at Waterfront Park in San Diego, with 46 artists on the bill and its dates confirmed. That's a small lineup by 2026 standards. Among the 39 festivals we hold with 20 or more names, the median bill is 66.

Small doesn't mean rare. We ran the 46 against every other lineup we hold, and 37 of them are booked at another indexed festival this season.

What exclusivity actually measures

We defined this metric a couple of weeks back and it's the most useful single number we have for a lineup. Lineup exclusivity is the share of a bill that appears at no other festival in the index. It's a rough proxy for how much of a festival you can only get by going to that festival.

CRSSD Fall comes in at 19.6% — nine of 46. Among the 39 festivals we hold with 20 or more names, that ranks 33rd. The median is 42.6%.

For scale, the top of that board is Desert Hearts Microfest at 82.8% and Infrasound Equinox at 75.3%. The bottom is Freaky Deaky at 7.7%. CRSSD sits down near the bottom quarter, in company it doesn't obviously belong in.

That's a real result and it isn't a criticism. It's a description of a booking strategy, and the rest of the data explains it.

The bill is the working circuit

Take the 46 names and ask a different question: how busy is each of them?

The average artist on CRSSD Fall is booked at 3.41 indexed festivals this season. Across those same 39 festivals, the median is 2.62. CRSSD's roster is the 9th busiest of the 39.

The busiest of them:

That's not a bill of discoveries. It's a bill of the house and techno acts who are working the hardest this year, caught at the point in the season where everyone is out. Low exclusivity and a busy roster are the same fact stated twice.

Nine names, and only here

The nine artists on CRSSD Fall who appear on no other lineup we hold:

Whatever curation is happening, it's happening here rather than at the top of the poster. A Helena Hauff or a Sébastien Tellier booking is not a name the circuit hands you — it's a choice someone made, and in our index it's a choice nobody else made this season.

The same weekend, 500 miles north

Here's the number that surprised us.

Portola runs 26–27 September at Pier 80 in San Francisco. Exactly the same two days. Same genre tags — house, techno, electronic. 66 names to CRSSD's 46.

The two bills share 14 artists: Ben UFO, Dean Turnley, ear, Groove Armada, horsegiirL, KETTAMA, Marlon Hoffstadt, Mind Enterprises, Mochakk, oskar med k, Prospa, Sam Alfred, Torren Foot and VTSS.

Thirty percent of the CRSSD bill is also billed in San Francisco on the identical dates.

One thing we can't tell you yet, and won't guess at: both festivals run two days, so an artist can play San Diego on the Saturday and San Francisco on the Sunday without anything clashing. We don't hold published day splits for either festival. When the set times go up — promoters usually post them two to seven days out, and we transcribe them — we'll know which of the 14 are doing the California double and which are a genuine either-or. That's a real question with a real answer coming, and nobody can answer it today.

It isn't only those two. Four California festivals sit on that weekend in our catalog: CRSSD in San Diego, Portola in San Francisco, Ocean Way in Santa Monica (22 names), and Same Same But Different in Perris across 25–27 September (48 names). Late September is the pinch point of the California season, and this year four bills are standing on the same two days.

CRSSD's competition isn't in San Diego

The other way to read a festival is against its own city. San Diego has four more indexed events on the calendar: NiteHarts on 9 October, RENEW on 15 November, Temper Festival on 30 December, and Proper NYE/NYD on New Year's Eve.

CRSSD Fall shares zero artists with all four. Not one name in common across 52 other San Diego bookings.

So the local calendar isn't a competitor and isn't a feeder. San Diego's festivals are booking entirely different rooms of the same city. CRSSD's overlap problem — if it is one — lives in San Francisco, Chicago and Miami: 14 shared names with Portola, 12 with ARC, 10 with III Points.

What this adds up to

A 46-name house and techno bill, on a confirmed date, at a waterfront park, built mostly from artists you can catch elsewhere this season — with nine you can't, and a same-weekend twin up the coast holding a third of the same names.

Whether that's a problem depends entirely on what you go for. If it's the names, a third of this bill has an alternative 500 miles north on the same days. If it's the room, the bay, and the specific nine, there's no substitute in our data.

Everything here is computed from our own index — the public festivals and leaderboard endpoints, as of 10 August 2026 — and it moves as lineups do. If you want the working, or the boards deeper than we publish them: casey@electricstate.app.