We said three artists had played 100 festivals. It's sixteen

On Friday we published a post here about the artists who have played a hundred festivals. We found three of them: Excision at 112, Tiësto at 104, Kaskade at 101. Zeds Dead was fourth at 95, five short.

Every one of those numbers is now too low.

Kaskade has 161. Zeds Dead has 159 — he wasn't in the club on Friday and he's second in it today. Excision has 152. Tiësto has 136. And there aren't three artists with a hundred festivals behind them. There are sixteen.

Nobody played sixty more shows over the weekend. We just found out about them.

The archive went back thirty years

On Friday our archive held 742 festivals. It holds 1,790 now.

Most of that is old. The oldest thing in there used to be from 1995. It's now Lollapalooza 1993 — a festival that happened before a lot of people reading this were born, and thirty-three years before the one you're buying tickets to. Along with it came roughly three thousand more artists, taking the archive past 11,900 names.

So when the board said Kaskade had played 101 festivals, it wasn't miscounting. It was counting every festival we had. We just didn't have very many.

Friday's post was right about a small archive. This one is right about a bigger one.

Then the app couldn't count them

There was a real bug underneath, and it's the part we'd rather not have written.

Our database hands back a maximum of a thousand rows at a time. For months that didn't matter, because we never had a thousand festivals. The moment the archive doubled, it mattered a lot: the boards were counting a thousand of the 1,790 festivals and quietly ignoring the rest.

Worse, we hadn't told it which thousand. There was no sort order on that query, so the festivals it happened to grab were arbitrary. Not the newest thousand, not the biggest — whichever thousand came back. Every board on the leaderboard was built from that.

Artist pages had it worse. Ask for a DJ's whole history and you'd get one season — Simply Jeff has been playing since 1995, and his page returned a single 2026 booking.

Both now read the archive a page at a time, until there's nothing left to read.

The list, as it actually stands

Sixteen artists have played a hundred or more festivals in our records.

Here's the four we named on Friday, then and now.

Zeds Dead gained 64, which is how he went from missing the list to nearly topping it.

One thing we can no longer tell you is how many artists have played ninety. On Friday it was four. The board only shows 25 names and every one of them is now at 94 or higher, so that answer has moved below where you can see it.

So is it complete now?

No. But we can now tell you where it isn't, which is the part we couldn't do a week ago.

Check us on the big ones. Ultra has run in Miami every year since 1999 except the two it lost to the pandemic. We have all 26 of them. EDC Las Vegas has run every year since 2011 except 2020, when nobody ran anything. We have all 15. Those are on the site right now — pick a year and open it.

The 1990s are the other story. The whole decade is eleven festivals in our archive. That is not dance music in the nineties. It's the part of it that made it onto the web in a form we could read thirty years later.

Then there are three gaps we measured on the way in, across the 1,574 festivals this backfill added:

The first one is why Busiest Venues is still shorter than it ought to be: a festival with no venue attached can't be counted toward one. The second matters more for the list above. If we logged eight names off a fifty-name bill, the forty-two we missed are forty-two counts that nobody got credit for.

Which is the real answer to "is this number right." Every count on our boards is a floor, not a ceiling — the most we can prove, not the most that happened. It has only ever moved in one direction, and it will move again.

And some of the biggest festival archives on the web refuse automated readers outright. We're building this from the sources that will let us in.

Go look your DJ up again

If you checked an artist's page in the last few weeks, check it again. It's a different page now — for a lot of DJs it's the first time it's shown their whole career instead of this season.

And if you screenshotted a number off our leaderboard to win an argument, we're sorry. Go get the new one. It's bigger.

Every count here comes straight off the boards.

Electric State is free on the App Store, on Google Play, and at electricstate.app — set times, lineups and the boards this post is counted from.

Make music as well as go to hear it? Bounce is our pocket studio for iPhone and iPad. A session, not a song.