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Ultra Japan booked 75 DJs and 58 of them play nowhere else on our calendar

Three weeks out, 58 of the 75 names in Tokyo turn up at no other festival we hold. EDC Korea, the same size bill, manages 32.

Most festivals of this size share their headliners with a dozen others. The same twenty or thirty names move between the big weekends all summer, and by September you have seen a lot of them.

Ultra Japan has 75 named DJs on its bill. 58 of them play no other festival anywhere in our catalog — not in Japan, not in Asia, not in America or Europe. That is 77 per cent of the lineup you can only see on 19 and 20 September, at Tokyo Odaiba Ultra Park, or not at all this season.

Thirty festivals in our catalog have 60 or more named artists. Only one is more self-contained than Ultra Japan: Off The Grid Campout SoCal in Apple Valley, where 64 of 72 names appear nowhere else. Ultra Japan is second, and the largest bill in that top two.

The obvious objection, and the answer to it

Here is the honest problem with that number. We hold exactly one Japanese festival in our catalog, and it is Ultra Japan. A Tokyo DJ has no second Japanese festival to turn up at, because we do not count one. So some of that 77 per cent is a hole in our data rather than a decision by a booker, and anyone quoting the figure should know that.

The reason we can still say something is that Ultra's own brand runs a control for us.

EDC Korea plays Paradise City in Incheon on 3 and 4 October. It is the same kind of event — a global brand landing a weekend in East Asia — and its bill is the same size, 75 named artists exactly. Korea sits in the same hole we do: one indexed festival in the country, the same absence of local competition to be counted against.

EDC Korea's bill is 32 names that play nowhere else. Ultra Japan's is 58.

Names on the bill, and how many play no other festival we hold

Names on the bill, and how many play no other festival we holdUltra Japan 75 names on the bill, 58 of which play nowhere else, EDC Korea 75 names on the bill, 32 of which play nowhere else, EDC Thailand 90 names on the bill, 25 of which play nowhere else0255075100names on the billof which play nowhere else75Ultra Japan75EDC Korea90EDC Thailand
Three East Asian editions of global brands, computed on 29 August 2026 against all 143 festivals in our upcoming catalog. Placeholder rows like "Lineup TBA" are not counted as artists.

Same size, same continent, same blind spot in what we count, and one of them books nearly twice as much of its bill from names that stay home. EDC Thailand is lower again at 25 of 90, though that one is not a clean comparison — we hold four Thai festivals, so its artists have somewhere else to show up.

The other way to see it: take every DJ on the Ultra Japan bill and count the festivals each one plays this season. The average is 1.79. That is the eleventh lowest of the 74 bills we count with 20 or more names. On the EDC Korea bill the same average is 3.61.

The seventeen who travel

Seventeen names on the Tokyo bill do play elsewhere, and they are the ones you would guess.

Sara Landry is on nine festival bills in our catalog, more than anyone else playing Tokyo. Alesso has eight. Knock2 and Lilly Palmer have seven each. Zedd and AFROJACK have six. Peggy Gou plays one other date we hold, Head Trip in Indio in October.

That is the imported layer, and every festival has one. What is unusual is how thin it is here. Seventeen of 75 means the other three quarters of the running order — KEN ISHII, RISA TANIGUCHI, MASAYOSHI IIMORI, Pasocom Music Club, TREKKIE TRAX CREW and 53 more — is booked once, here.

What that means if you are going

It changes what the ticket is for. At a festival with a heavily shared bill, the headliners are the draw and you will get another shot at most of them in three weeks somewhere closer to home. At this one, the top of the poster is the part you can catch again. The rest of it is the part you cannot.

So the useful move is to work the schedule from the bottom up. Follow a few of the 58 in the app before you go, let the set times land, and build the day around the names you have no second chance at rather than the four you could also catch at EDC Orlando in November.

Tickets

Ultra Japan is not one of the festivals we can sell tickets for — it sells through its own site, not a vendor we work with, so there is no link here for the festival this post is about.

Ticket links below are affiliate links.

Every count here is ours, computed on 29 August 2026 from the 143 festivals in our upcoming catalog, and it will move as lineups fill in. If we add a second Japanese festival tomorrow, Ultra Japan's number comes down, and we will say so.


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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