electricstate
← back to blog festival

Making Time booked 148 acts and 129 of them play nowhere else

Fort Mifflin gets the fourth-biggest bill we track. It is also the only big one where almost nobody on it turns up anywhere else.

Every festival lineup is partly a rerun. The circuit DJs work all summer, so by September you have already seen most of the big names once, and you will see them again in October. That is not a complaint. It is how touring works.

Making Time is the exception, at a size where being the exception is genuinely hard.

Three days at Fort Mifflin, the 18th-century river fort behind the Philadelphia airport, 18 to 20 September. The bill runs to 148 acts, which makes it the fourth-largest we hold, behind III Points, Lost Lands and Amsterdam Dance Event. Of those 148, 129 play no other festival in the 146 upcoming events we currently hold.

Bicep is one of them. So are Kim Gordon, Theo Parrish and Skee Mask. Each of their pages says the same thing: one upcoming show, and it is this one.

How unusual 129 is

Big lineups usually get big by booking the circuit. Across the other ten bills we hold with 100 or more names, 593 of 1,400 slots go to a DJ who plays nowhere else — about two in five. Making Time is at almost nine in ten.

The eleven lineups of 100+ names, and how much of each you can only see there

The eleven lineups of 100+ names, and how much of each you can only see thereIII Points 212 names on the bill, 119 of which play nowhere else, Lost Lands 210 names on the bill, 60 of which play nowhere else, Amsterdam Dance Event 149 names on the bill, 64 of which play nowhere else, Making Time 148 names on the bill, 129 of which play nowhere else, North Coast Music Festival 144 names on the bill, 73 of which play nowhere else, ARC Music Festival 140 names on the bill, 47 of which play nowhere else, Tomorrowland Thailand 119 names on the bill, 70 of which play nowhere else, EDC Orlando 116 names on the bill, 16 of which play nowhere else, Groove Cruise Miami 106 names on the bill, 66 of which play nowhere else, EDC Colombia 103 names on the bill, 45 of which play nowhere else, Hocus Pocus 101 names on the bill, 33 of which play nowhere elsenames on the billof which play nowhere elseIII Points212Lost Lands210Amsterdam Dance Event149Making Time148North Coast Music Festival144ARC Music Festival140Tomorrowland Thailand119EDC Orlando116Groove Cruise Miami106EDC Colombia103Hocus Pocus101
Every festival in our catalog with 100 or more named acts, as of 3 September 2026. The inner bar counts acts appearing on no other festival we hold.

Worth saying plainly: a DJ playing exactly one festival is not rare at all. Of the 3,132 names across our whole catalog, 2,265 turn up once — 72% of them. Most acts are not touring the circuit. The unusual thing here is not one one-off booking. It is 129 of them stacked into a single weekend, at a scale where every other promoter has reached for the names already working.

The middle of the pack is 44%. Making Time is at 87%, and the three bills above it are 23, 46 and 72 names — a quarter of its size or less.

The nineteen who travel

Nineteen acts on the bill do turn up elsewhere. Marcel Dettmann has four dates in our records, Tiga and Avalon Emerson five each, Daphni three. The other fifteen add between one and three dates apiece.

That is the whole travelling contingent. Nobody on the bill is on the ten most-booked artists we track, and there are no back-to-back sets listed. If you came for a name you can point at from across the field, this is not the weekend for it.

Not a Philadelphia gap

The obvious objection is that we simply do not hold much of Philadelphia, so of course its bill looks self-contained. That does not survive a check.

Breakaway Philadelphia runs a week earlier, half an hour down the river in Chester. Same metro, same catalog, same September. Of its 26 acts, four play nowhere else — 15%. The city is covered. The two festivals are just booking from different rooms.

The second objection is genre: this is a techno, house and outsider bill, and those acts tour differently. Also checkable, and also no. ARC carries the same house and techno tags at 140 names and lands at 34%. Amsterdam Dance Event is at 43%, III Points at 56%. Booking left of centre does not by itself produce this number.

The same weekend

Seven other festivals we hold overlap those dates, including Lost Lands, Nocturnal Wonderland and Ultra Japan. Between them they put 456 different acts on stage that weekend.

Not one of them is also at Fort Mifflin.

If you are choosing where to be on 19 September, that is the actual decision in front of you. Six hundred acts are playing, and the two lists do not touch. Follow a few of the 129 in the app and you will find out quickly whether this is your weekend, because if it is, there is no second chance at them in our calendar this year.

Tickets

Ticket links below are affiliate links.

Making Time sells direct from its own site, so we have no ticket link for it.

Every count here comes from the lineups in our own catalog on 3 September 2026, matched on artist name without regard to capitalisation. Thirty of the 129 were checked a second way, against their own artist pages, and all thirty said one upcoming show.

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

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