North Coast and ARC share exactly one artist

Two of the five largest festival lineups left this year run on the same three days, three miles apart, in the same city. That has no other example in our catalog.

North Coast Music Festival is at SeatGeek Stadium in Bridgeview from 4 to 6 September, twenty-two days out. ARC Music Festival is at Union Park from 4 to 7 September. North Coast has 144 named artists. ARC has 140. Of the 54 upcoming festivals with a countable lineup, those are the fourth and fifth largest bills we hold, behind only Creamfields, III Points and Lost Lands.

Between them there are 283 distinct artists. That is more names in one metro over one weekend than the biggest single lineup on our calendar.

One of the 283 is booked at both.

The only collision in the catalog

Here is the measure, and it is worth being precise about how it is built, because the naive version invents clashes that do not exist.

Take all 115 upcoming festivals. For every pair, check whether the date ranges genuinely intersect — actual overlapping days, not both landing in something you have called a weekend. That leaves 236 overlapping pairs. Now sort them by the distance between the two sites.

North Coast and ARC are 2.9 miles apart. The next closest overlapping pair in the entire catalog is 73 miles apart, and the one after that 74. Everything else is farther still. This is not the tightest example of a common pattern. It is the only example, by a factor of twenty-five.

That distance is the whole reason the artist overlap is interesting. Two festivals sharing one name is unremarkable when they are on opposite coasts. These two are on the same city's transit map.

One name out of 283

The shared artist is Chase & Status, who have five upcoming festivals on our calendar and are booked on both Chicago bills.

Everything else about the two lineups points in opposite directions, and it shows up cleanly on the Most Booked board — our ranking of the 25 artists with the most festival dates across the year, played and upcoming.

North Coast books eight of those 25: Levity, Crankdat, Level Up, GRiZ, Wooli, YDG, BUNT. and Chris Lorenzo.

ARC books three: Sara Landry, Boys Noize and Cloonee.

The genre tags say the same thing in fewer words. North Coast carries bass, drum and bass, house and techno. ARC carries house and techno, and nothing else. Two bills, one weekend, and very little overlap in what they are actually programming.

North Coast's own numbers are ordinary, and that is fine

Of the 144 names on North Coast, 79 appear at no other festival on our upcoming calendar. That share — 54.9% — is what we call lineup exclusivity, and across the 54 countable bills it ranks 17th. The middle of the top third. ARC sits at 40.7%, 28th.

The companion measure is the circuit index: the average number of indexed festivals per artist on a bill. North Coast is at 2.72, 29th of 54. ARC is at 2.47, 33rd. Both are close to the centre of a range that runs from 1.00 to 4.83.

Neither festival is a standout on either measure, and a profile that dressed those ranks up would be doing the reader a disservice. North Coast's most-booked names are genuinely well travelled — Crankdat has eleven upcoming festivals on our calendar, YDG and Levity ten each, GRiZ nine — and the bill around them is ordinary in the specific sense that half of it is shared with the rest of the season. The interesting fact about this festival is not what is on the bill. It is what is happening three miles away at the same time.

What the data cannot tell you

Our numbers say the two lineups barely intersect. They say nothing about whether the two festivals compete for the same person, and we are not going to guess. Neither has published set times yet, so the version of this question that would actually matter to somebody holding both wristbands — whether the sets they care about clash by the hour — is not answerable from our data today. Most festivals publish two to seven days out. If either does, it will show up on the event pages above.

What we can say is narrow and checkable. Fourth and fifth largest bills of the year. Same three days. Three miles. One name in common out of 283.

Tickets

Ticket links below are affiliate links.

• ARC Music Festival — tickets via Front Gate

North Coast sells from its own site rather than through a seller we link, so the event page above is the place to start for it.

Computed on 13 August 2026 from our own festival catalog and the Most Booked board — 115 upcoming festivals, of which 54 have 20 or more named artists after placeholder rows are filtered out. Exclusivity and circuit index are measured across those 54, matching artist names case-insensitively. Distances are between published venue coordinates. Every figure here is recomputable from the same public data, and will move as lineups drop.

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

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