The Scene Index, briefly

Everyone in dance music has an opinion about who's having a big year. Almost nobody has the count.

The Scene Index is our attempt at the count. We track every festival lineup we can get our hands on and turn it into structured data — who is booked where, on which day, alongside whom. It isn't a curated list or an editorial ranking. It's an arithmetic result, recomputed the moment a lineup drops.

The unit of record is the booking

This is the part that makes it useful, and it's the part most music datasets get wrong.

Most databases treat the event as the row: one festival, one date, one venue, and the lineup stuffed into a text field. That structure can tell you what's happening this weekend. It cannot tell you anything about an artist's year.

Our row is the booking — a specific artist, at a specific festival, on a specific day. Back-to-back sets are split into their members, so a B2B counts for both artists rather than disappearing into a single string.

Once the booking is the unit, a different class of question becomes answerable:

• How many festivals is this artist playing this season, and where?
• Whose bills do they keep sharing?
• Which markets have they already worked, and how recently?
• Which rooms is a roster completely missing?

Those aren't questions you can eyeball off a poster. They fall out of the data.

What's in it

Figures below are as of 8 August 2026, and they move — that's the point of a maintained dataset rather than a report.

The forward-looking catalog holds 62 upcoming festivals, and those lineups name 1,861 distinct artists between them. Across everything indexed to date the corpus runs to 82 festival editions.

Records carry festival name, dates, venue, city, coordinates and genre tags, plus the full lineup with day-by-day splits. Seven of the upcoming festivals also carry full per-stage set times — 562 individual sets, transcribed from official schedules as promoters publish them, typically two to seven days out.

Coverage runs from the obvious down to the bills most datasets never see — EDC and Tomorrowland, but also regional and underground events that never make a wire service.

What it says today

A few things standing out in the current data:

• ALLEYCVT and Sara Landry are tied at the top with 13 festivals each, ahead of KETTAMA and Subtronics at 12. Two of the four are harder-edged bookings than the household names most season round-ups lead with.
• The most-stacked bill isn't the biggest lineup. Headliner density and lineup size are different measurements, and conflating them is how most "biggest festival" lists go wrong. The largest lineup in the catalog isn't in the top three once you count how many of those names are actually headline bookings.
• Back-to-back billing is now measurable. Because a B2B is stored as one set with two artists rather than a single name, the index can rank which pairs keep appearing together — a question no lineup-as-text dataset can answer at all.

Every one of those is a count, not a take. Which is the whole point.

What you're seeing here is one month's snapshot of four boards. The licensed feed carries each of them twenty-five deep, plus the thing a single snapshot can never give you: movement — who climbed, who fell, and by how much, month over month.

The one thing it can't do

A backfill is a data event, not a scene event.

When we add a festival's missing openers — and openers go missing from published lineups constantly — dozens of artists gain a booking on the same afternoon. On a chart that looks exactly like a trend. It isn't one.

So the monthly read separates catalog growth from real movement, and refuses to call direction off a single snapshot. A dataset that can't tell you when it's fooling itself isn't worth licensing.

Who it's for

Agents — see where your roster is booked against everyone else's, and which rooms they're missing.

Promoters — check saturation before you book. Who has already played the market, how recently, and on whose bill.

Brands — target sponsorship by real reach, measured in bookings across a season rather than name recognition.

It's delivered as a monthly export or an API feed, in CSV or JSON, with a quarterly read on where the scene is moving.

Want to know whether it covers your question? Tell us what you're trying to answer — casey@electricstate.app — and we'll tell you straight if the data supports it.