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KETTAMA's festival breakout is bigger than it looks

32 bookings all-time, 18 of them this year, 10 still to play. The count on an artist who reached the top of the board from a different set of rooms.

Thirty-two bookings is not a big number in the Scene Index. Subtronics has 86. Excision has 112. One hundred and eighty-three artists in the index have more.

Ten upcoming bookings is a big number. Only eight artists on the circuit have that many right now, and KETTAMA is one of them, tied at 10 with YDG, Level Up, ILLENIUM and Levity, behind Subtronics at 12 and Know Good and Crankdat at 11.

Both numbers are his. The gap between them is the story.

A history that is mostly this year

A booking here is one artist on one festival edition's published lineup; a back-to-back counts once for each member. KETTAMA's first is New Year's Eve 2019 at Beyond The Valley, a 45-name bill in rural Victoria, Australia. Then the index has nothing for him until March 2023, when he appears on a 27-name CRSSD in San Diego.

By calendar year the count runs 1, 0, 0, 0, 3, 2, 7, and then 18 dated 2026, with one more already on the books for January 2027. Eighteen of 32 is 56% of his entire indexed history in a single year. Of the eight artists with ten or more upcoming, only Know Good, whose first indexed booking is this year, has a higher share.

The all-time totals of those eight, for scale: Subtronics 86, ILLENIUM 86, Level Up 68, Crankdat 55, YDG 42, Levity 39, KETTAMA 32, Know Good 18. Seven of them built their upcoming ten on a deeper record. He and Know Good are the two who arrived at the top of the board almost entirely on the strength of one season.

The rooms are different

The plainest way to see it is who else is on his bills.

Take his ten upcoming festivals and check each one for the other seven artists in that top group. Six of the ten carry none of them: Creamfields, Breakaway Carolina, Portola, CRSSD Fall, Head Trip and Groove Cruise Miami. Run the same test on the others and the answer is Crankdat zero, YDG zero, Levity zero, Level Up one, Subtronics two, Know Good three, ILLENIUM three. Their upcoming bills overlap constantly. His mostly don't overlap with theirs.

The names he does keep sharing bills with, across all 32, are Eli Brown at 12, I Hate Models and Prospa at 11, Chris Lake and Dom Dolla at 10. Chris Lake is on five of the ten still to come, more than anyone. That is a house and techno roster, and it is the roster of the rooms his history is made of: CRSSD, Portola, III Points, Seismic, Kappa FuturFestival, Sónar, Awakenings.

Subtronics, for what it's worth, is also on ten of his 32. Only one of those ten is ahead of them, Lights All Night in December.

The rooms are also new to him

The index holds earlier editions of most of the festivals on his 2026 route, and he is on almost none of them.

  • CRSSD Fall: eight editions in the index from 2015 to 2023 without him. 2025 is the first with his name, and 2026 the second.
  • Portola: 2022, 2023 and 2024 without him. 2025 first, 2026 again.
  • III Points: nine editions from 2013 to 2023 without him. 2024 first, and 2026 at 212 names.
  • Hulaween: eleven editions from 2013 to 2025 without him. October is the first.
  • Ultra Music Festival in Miami: twenty editions in the index back to 1999. 2025 is the first.
  • Kappa FuturFestival in Turin: eleven editions from 2012 without him. 2025, his first European festival in the index, is the first.

The size of the bills changed with the rooms. Before 2026 he had been on two lineups of 100 or more names, EDC Las Vegas 2023 at 216 and Ultra 2025 at 108. Dated 2026 or later there are eleven, seven of them over 150: both weekends of Coachella, EDC Las Vegas at 255, Tomorrowland at 398, Lollapalooza at 170, Creamfields at 245, III Points at 212.

Where the route goes

His 2026 bookings sit in five countries: the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Of the eight artists at ten or more upcoming, he is the only one whose 2026 dates outside the US are all in Europe, and the only one with no Canadian or Mexican booking this year at all. The others' seasons run through Toronto, Mexico City, Bangkok, Incheon and Medellín. His runs through Barcelona, Amsterdam, Boom and Cheshire.

The ten still to come compress into seven weekends. The weekend of 26 September has him on three bills in three cities: Breakaway Carolina in Concord, Portola in San Francisco and CRSSD Fall in San Diego, the last two on the same two days. New Year's Eve has him on two, Lights All Night in Dallas and Decadence Arizona outside Phoenix, again on the same dates. None of those festivals has set times in the index yet, so which day he plays where is not something we can say. When they publish, it will be.

What the count can and can't say

The index does not see clubs. It sees festival lineups. An artist built in clubs is invisible to it until festivals start booking him, and for KETTAMA that is 2023 in our records. The three empty years before it are partly that and partly coverage: the index holds 8 editions dated 2020 and 25 dated 2021, against 177 dated 2026. So the "1, 0, 0, 0" at the start of his line is not evidence he was idle. It is a limit of what a festival index counts.

Older lineups can be incomplete, and an absence in our records is not proof of an absence on a bill. The firsts above are stated as firsts in the index.

A booking is blind to the slot. A closing set and an opening one are one row each.

Every figure above is recomputable from the public catalog, and each artist's own page carries its upcoming count as an independent check. KETTAMA's says 10. So do YDG's, Level Up's and Levity's.

Tickets

Ticket links below are affiliate links. Seven of his ten upcoming festivals aren't in our ticket feed and carry no link here.

Want an artist's full booking history, and who they keep sharing bills with, rather than one snapshot? Tell us what you're trying to answer — casey@electricstate.app — and we'll tell you straight whether the data supports it.

Electric State is free on the App Store, on Google Play, and at electricstate.app — lineups, artist pages and the booking history this post is computed from.

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