Features
45,000 Ready For Ultra
About 45,000 people showed up for the first Ultra Music Festival Singapore the weekend of September 10-11. Event producers Alex Chew and Raj Datwani told CNBC that they’ve only just begun to “tap local interest” in the electronic dance music that the international festival is famous for.
The concert took place at Bayfront Avenue and featured Kygo, DJ Snake, Alesso, Axwell and Ingrosso and Zhu. The two producers made their mark last year with a smaller EDM event during Singapore’s Grand Prix Season last year called Road to Ultra.
“We thought the market here was ready for Ultra,” Chew told CNBC. “With the production quality, the type of talent Ultra attracts, we thought this was just the right time to bring the festival here.”
Ultra festivals first started in Miami Beach in 1999 and have since spread throughout the world thanks to U.S. concert promoter Russell Faibisch.
They now stage in 19 countries across five continents, but nowhere has the genre grown as much as in Asia.
The managing director of Spotify for Asia told CNBC, “We see EDM as one of the top most-streamed genres amongst [our] users.”
Datwani, as the co-founder and executive producer of Ultra Singapore, says he is already thinking about how to build on this year’s success. “We have a lot of plans for years to come to grow significantly larger.”
Zhu, a Chinese-American DJ-producer and Grammy nominee, added, “I think Asia will be a great place for electronic music in the future, as long as people innovate. It’s got the biggest concentration of population on this earth, and if they all like something it’s an intense market.”
That means local talent can take advantage of an event with worldwide connections, and many Singaporean DJs, such as 21-year-old DJ Myrne, were featured at Ultra Singapore.