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How Subtronics became the festival circuit's busiest artist

86 bookings, 46 festivals, 41 cities, eight countries. The arc from Bass Canyon and Lost Lands to Coachella, Tomorrowland and Outside Lands, told from the count.

The busiest artist on the festival circuit right now first appears in our records on a 39-name bill at the Gorge in August 2018. The festival was Bass Canyon. Three weeks later he was on Lost Lands. That was the whole year: two festivals, both dubstep, both Excision's.

Eight years on, Subtronics sits at number one on the Most Booked board with 12 upcoming festivals, ahead of Know Good and Crankdat at 11. He has 86 bookings in the Scene Index. And counting only editions dated 2018 or later, the year his history starts, no artist in the index has more.

This is the arc from the first two to the 86, told from the count rather than the press.

The count

A booking in the Scene Index is one artist on one festival edition's published lineup. A back-to-back counts once for each of its members. That is the whole definition, and every number here is a count of those rows.

Subtronics has 86. They fall across 46 distinct festivals, 41 cities and eight countries. Twelve are still ahead of him, which is what puts him at the top of the public catalog's 120 upcoming festivals and their 2,486 named artists.

The comparison that matters is the one that starts when he does. Restrict the whole index to editions dated 1 January 2018 onward and the top of the board reads Subtronics 86, Excision 79, Wooli 76, ILLENIUM 71. Excision has more bookings all-time, 112 to 86, because his history runs back to 2010. Over the years the two overlap, the artist whose first two records are on Excision's own festivals has been booked more often than the man who runs them.

2018 to 2020: one sound

The first eight bookings, through the end of 2019, are Bass Canyon twice, Lost Lands, HARD Summer, Shambhala, Nocturnal Wonderland, Wakaan and HiJinx. Shambhala, in British Columbia, is the first booking outside the United States. Every one of the eight is a bill our catalog tags bass or dubstep.

Then 2020, which in the index is one row: the announced lineup for EDC Las Vegas 2020, the year that edition never happened. It still counts. Of the 7,808 artists with at least one booking since 2018, only 63 have a booking in every calendar year from 2018 through 2026, 2020 included. He is one of them.

2021 to 2023: the big Electronic bills

The pattern changes with the reopening. Seven bookings in 2021, and two of them are Insomniac's largest bills: EDC Las Vegas at 206 names and EDC Orlando at 128. A third is the first Cyclops Cove, his own event, ten names in Boca Raton. Lost Lands that year had grown to 140 names from the 67 he first played on.

2022 is ten bookings, including a first Electric Forest and a first Escape. 2023 is eight, and the first outside the United States and Canada: EDC Mexico in February. Three countries in a year, up from one.

The clearest way to see the shift is not genre tags, which drift, but the festivals whose earlier editions we already hold. EDC Las Vegas is in the index every year from 2011. He is on none of the nine editions before 2020, and on six editions since.

2024 to 2026: the passport

The last three years are the ones the headline is about, and they are the ones where the count starts describing a different job.

2024: 17 bookings, and a first booking in Europe at Ultra Europe in Split. The index holds nine earlier editions of Ultra Europe going back to 2013. He is on none of them.

2025: 13 bookings, opening in January at EDC Thailand, his first in Asia, then Ultra Music Festival in Miami. The index holds 20 editions of Ultra Miami before that one, back to 1999. 2025 is the first with his name.

2026, so far: 22 bookings, his most in any calendar year, with 12 still to play. Both weekends of Coachella. EDC Las Vegas at 255 names. Ultra Europe again. Tomorrowland, at 398 names the largest bill he has ever been on. Outside Lands last weekend, and the index holds 17 earlier editions of Outside Lands going back to 2008 without him. Then, still to come, Lost Lands, EDC Korea in Incheon, EDC Colombia in Medellín, Ultra Mexico, and Lights All Night in Dallas to close the year.

Countries per calendar year, 2018 through 2026: one, two, one, one, two, three, three, three, seven. The seven are the United States, Croatia, Belgium, Canada, South Korea, Colombia and Mexico.

What stayed the same

The circuit-wide artist is still, a good part of the time, a dubstep artist playing dubstep rooms.

Lost Lands is on his record seven times, every year since 2021 plus 2018. Bass Canyon four. Forbidden Kingdom four. Cyclops Cove four, counting this December's. Eleven of the 86 are on Lost Lands or Bass Canyon alone. Of the twelve still ahead this year, Cyclops Cove, Ember Shores, BOO Seattle and Give Thanks Festival sit alongside the EDCs.

That is the useful version of "busiest." The board is not measuring who crossed over. It is measuring who twelve different promoters in twelve different markets can each build a night around, and the answer this year is an artist who added Coachella and Tomorrowland without giving up Thornville.

The caveats, stated plainly

The index is far denser in recent years than in early ones: it holds 36 editions dated 2018 and 177 dated 2026. His two bookings in 2018 and 22 in 2026 sit on very different catalogs, so the raw year-on-year growth overstates the real one. That is why this post leans on rank within a season, and on firsts at festivals whose earlier editions we already hold, rather than on the count going up.

Older lineups can be incomplete. An absence in our records is not proof of an absence on a bill, which is why nothing here claims he stopped playing anywhere.

A booking is blind to the slot. Closing the main stage and opening a side tent are one row each.

Every figure above is recomputable from the public catalog and the artist's own page, which carries its upcoming count as an independent check on ours. Both say 12.

Tickets

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

Want an artist's full booking history, month over month, 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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