Electronic Artists Booked the Most by Festivals in 2021

Sara Mekinc

Feb 2, 2022

Electronic artists were the winners of the 2021 festival scene. How do we know? Because we went through a trillion data points from all major online channels to find useful insights for festival organizers and music pros. 

The results are presented in our “2022 State of Music” address, which you can download for free.

We examined the lineups and other key metrics of the top 500 music festivals in our extensive database and found that Electronic artists were the most booked in 2021. Of all festivals in 2021, 33% were primarily Electronic – more than half of these mainly booked Electronic artists, while 36% featured Hip Hop or Pop as a secondary genre.

In 2021, the “festival hotspots” were the United States (56 festivals) and the United Kingdom, where Pop was the prevailing genre. The festivals that were mentioned the most on social media by artists and other festivals included Lollapalooza, Tomorrowland Belgium, Welcome To Rockville, Electric Daisy Carnival – Las Vegas, and Austin City Limits Music Festival. 

And how to spot artists that might make a cool addition to upcoming lineups? If you’re a festival organizer, you might want to check out TikTok to see who’s currently making waves. The channel’s short-form video format is predicted to be one of the key trends of 2022. 

As artists and other music pros are adopting strategic cross-channel promotion, we can also expect TikTok hits to spill over into Spotify streams. We’ll also see multilingual music breaking further into the mainstream, as suggested by the meteoric rise of K-Pop and Latin artists.

The report also pinpoints artists who grew the most in popularity in 2021, as well as promising talent that’s currently “hot” on Spotify and TikTok. These include: PinkPantheress (Indie pop), Mareux (Electronic), Tokischa (Latin), Crawlers (Alternative Rock), Orelsan (Hip Hop), and amaarae (R&B). Check out the full list in the report.