Inside Electric Daisy Carnival’s $47 Million EDM Empire
The sprawling, neon-lit lost weekend Electric Daisy Carnival will take over Las Vegas this weekend for its 20th annual installment. For three days, attendees will commune with fire-breathing monoliths, behold vast art installations, carouse in amoebic dance crowds and bask in the glow of millions of LED lights.
More Olympic event than music festival, EDC attracts herculean crowds. Since 2011, more than 2 million people – roughly the population of Paris – have attended the gargantuan dance party held at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The event has also drawn its share of controversy. The 2010 death of a 15-year-old girl in the parking lot of an EDC festival raised alarms about safety at these increasingly ubiquitous events. A year later, the fest came under fire for possible embezzlement.
At the center of it all is Pasquale Rotella, the 41-year-old EDC ringleader and founder of tour promotion company Insomniac. On paper, he sounds like music’s Jordan Belfort. He’s married to former Playboy bunny Holly Madison. He’s also become the main player in the electronic dance music industry that’s worth $7.1 billion as of 2016, according to the International Music Summit. EDM‘s global worth has grown more than 60 percent in three years. In that same time frame, Insomniac made a $50 million partnership with Live Nation that boosted its profile and reach. Insomniac now hosts 12 events per year, including Electric Daisy Carnival, Electric Forest, Crush, Bassrush, Nocturnal Wonderland, Beyond Wonderland, Escape and Countdown. Insomniac owns nightclubs (like Los Angeles’ Create and Exchange LA) and a record label and is bringing its surreal raves into global markets like Mexico City, the U.K. and Brazil. (India and Japan are next.)
For being an EDM mogul, Rotella is remarkably unflashy. He wears a half-cocked baseball hat, casting his grey-speckled scruff in shadow. “I didn’t come into this world as a businessman,” he said to Rolling Stone. “When I would go to an event, music was only one artistic form I was attracted to.”
The 2016 festival, running through 19th, will feature 250 artists, most under the umbrella of dance music, but not all. In the past, rap and pop acts like Kiesza, Empire of the Sun, Chromeo, Kid Cudi, Schoolboy Q, Lil B, La Roux have performed at EDC. Between 2011 and 2015, Insomniac Events spent $156 million on the Las Vegas EDC show alone. “The fans are the attraction,” Rotella said. “They’re connecting with the DJ, they’re connecting with each other, they’re putting on their own performance, putting on a show for the artists.” There is a misconception about electronic music festivals like the ones he builds, that music takes a backseat. Unlike other big ticket fests like Coachella or Desert Trip, attendees aren’t there basking in nostalgia, to rub shoulders with celebrities or to glimpse a famous band reunion. Like any true bacchanal, EDC is purely about the present.
The first Insomniac event in 1993 had 300 people show up and Rotella’s Italian immigrant mother, Irene, working the door. “My father was an adult at nine years old, taking care of his mother and sister,” said Rotella, of his Calabrian-born dad. “He stole bread to survive.” That background made his parents less wary than others might have been of their teenage son running around semi-legal locations in downtown L.A. at night.