Two in five things on this schedule are not music
Same Same But Different published 201 timed entries across nine stages. Seventy are workshops. Across the twenty other schedules we hold there are three.
We hold the full published schedule for 21 festivals. Twenty of them look the same as each other: a grid of sets, one line per act, one act per line.
Same Same But Different does not.
Its grid runs to 201 timed entries — every line the festival has put a start time against, whether that is a DJ, a band, a film or a class. That is the most of any schedule in our records. Outside Lands, a far bigger event, published 156. North Coast published 125.
Seventy of those 201 lines are a workshop, billed the way this festival bills workshops: a thing, by a person. Across the other twenty schedules we hold, that pattern turns up three times, all of them at Outside Lands.
What is actually on it
Puppet Making by Mozie. Birding 101: California Lek Nests by Stormy. Speed Dating with Death by Hensley. Windchime Making with Jax. A 5K run. Thirteen separate entries for But Cinema, a movie room that also puts on a gameshow, on a stage that finds time for somebody's bingo night as well. Seventy workshops and thirteen cinema entries is 83 of the 201 lines before you count the run, the bingo or the open mic.
Three of the nine stages spend most of their hours on something other than a set. Creation Station carries 40 entries, 24 of them workshops: painting, clay, upcycling. Family Garden carries 30, 20 of them workshops, and the kids' crafts hand over to live bands later on. Innerspace carries 23, 20 of them workshops — yoga, sound baths, acroyoga, a Thai massage class.
LSDREAM plays the Same Stage, the main room. LSDREAM also holds two Innerspace sessions under their own name, Happy Healing and Lightcode. Most festival schedules do not give a headliner a second job.
| Festival | Timed entries | Hosted workshops |
|---|---|---|
| Same Same But Different | 201 | 70 |
| Outside Lands | 156 | 3 |
| North Coast | 125 | 0 |
| Goldrush | 122 | 0 |
| ARC | 96 | 0 |
| Bass Canyon | 88 | 0 |
The six longest set-time grids in our records. A hosted workshop is an entry billed as a thing by a person, which is how this festival names them and almost nobody else does.
The bill underneath it
None of this is instead of a lineup. Same Same But Different has 119 named acts, and in a catalog of 155 upcoming festivals only four bills are bigger. One other is exactly the same size.
Eighty-three of those 119 play no other festival in the catalog this season. Machinedrum, Kasablanca, Of The Trees and Tape B are all playing elsewhere this autumn. Most of the people around them on this grid are not.
That is the useful half of the workshop count. A festival that programmes 70 classes is not filling time it could not book. It is choosing to spend the room on something other than a DJ.
It came early, too
The schedule reached our records fourteen days before the gates open. Across the 21 grids we hold, the middle one reached us six days out, and five of them arrived on the day of the festival or after it had started.
Fourteen days is a floor rather than a boast. It is when the file got to us, so the festival posted it at least that early and possibly earlier. Either way, it is the kind of lead time that lets somebody plan a weekend instead of a night.
If you are going
Nine stages and 201 entries is not a schedule you can wing. The nights run past midnight, so the grid spans four calendar dates for a three-day festival, and the music and the workshops overlap constantly — the Creation Station and Family Garden classes run head to head with the Coconut Cove and Nakey Island sets.
Pick the two or three non-music things you actually want first, then build the sets around them. That is the opposite of how you plan most festivals, and it is the right way round for this one.
The full grid is on the event page, stage by stage.
Same Same But Different sells direct from its own site, so we have no ticket link for it.
Every number here comes from the lineups and set-time grids we publish. Counted on 12 September 2026, across the 155 upcoming festivals in the catalog and the 21 whose full schedules we hold.
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.
Make music as well as go to hear it? Bounce is our pocket studio for iPhone and iPad. A session, not a song.