John Summit Announces Experts Only Festival In New York City With Kaskade, Green Velvet & More

On Sept. 20 and 21, John Summit will be taking over New York City’s Randall’s Island for the inaugural Experts Only festival, featuring performances by Kaskade back-to-back Cassian, Green Velvet back-to-back Layton Giordani, LP Giobbi, AYYBO and more.

Promoted in partnership with Medium Rare, Relentless Beats and EMW, the festival anticipates 50,000 fans over the course of its two days, with tickets going on sale this Friday at 10 a.m. ET. With more than 15 artists across two stages, the festival promises to feature state-of-the -art stage designs, food and beverage options, interactive brand activations and more.

LIV at Fontainebleau Las Vegas and Miami Beach will be curating their LIV Skydeck for the festival.

John Summit and his team first began thinking about hosting their own music festival in early 2024, the team recognizing that with Electric Zoo no longer taking place in New York City, a hole was left in the market.

“There wasn’t a clear opportunity in the market where things like E-Zoo and everything had been in the past,” Holt Harmon, John Summit’s manager and CEO of Metatone tells Pollstar. “There wasn’t a clear, dominant festival in the New York market. And, for us, the first bit was more like, ‘We hope somebody creates a new festival,’ more than anything. Then, six to nine months ago, we realized it could be something we even work on ourselves.”

For John Summit, the idea of putting on a music festival of his own was a perfect fit. His team emphasizes how much he enjoys attending music festivals, even camping at many himself.

“He’s such a festival guy,” Shailee Bendavid, day-to-day manager and creative for John Summit, tells Pollstar.”Since the day I’ve met him, which is five years now, he’s wanted to throw his own festival. It’s special he’s grown his label as fast as he did, and started his own event series [Summit started his label, Experts Only, in May 2022] – it’s so fun to be involved, but also special to watch from the sideline as someone’s dreams come true so quickly.”

Bendavid has experience with music festivals, serving as a talent buyer and curator for III Points in Miami for the last four years alongside festival founder David Sinopoli. While Summit grew up in Chicago and currently resides in Miami, he and his team felt New York City was the best place for the Experts Only festival.

“In New York, he just did Madison Square Garden, so what’s next?” Bendavid says. “What else can he do, and what else can we build for our community? New York made a lot of sense because it’s going to be something so special and so different than what everyone else is doing. And, coming off MSG, we want him to have something different, and not just make it about him but also about the artists we work with.”

The team looked at several different spots before settling on Randall’s Island for the event. While the island has faced several issues as a site for festivals over the years, Governor’s Ball used to host its event on the island, but moved primarily due to accessibility issues and weather-related challenges, now taking place in Queens. Electric Zoo also took place on the island, but no longer returns after mismanagement issues during its 2023 edition.

“Two came up as possibilities, and one it just wasn’t possible to permit,” Harmon says. “Randall’s Island always felt like this thing that was so large, the idea of touching it and throwing something there felt right outside the lines of what was realistic. But, it was perfect because something hadn’t been there in a while. It has a gravitas and an impact in the market, everyone knows what it is. There’s been a dip in the market in the last year or two, there wasn’t really much big happening there in the electronic space. It became a no-brainer that hit us. It’s an ambitious move, but it’s the perfect move because it has that notoriety. People are familiar with it.”

While building a music festival in the heart of New York City is no easy task, the tight-knit team says that because they’ve had some advantages being independent. With less red tape, they were able to quickly communicate with one another, and ideas were easy to float around.

“I think one of the things we benefit from is the cohesion of being such a tight-knit team,”Jack David, Head of Marketing at John Summit’s label, Experts Only, says. “Just comparing it to my major days, when you had so many teams around the world and everyone’s working in different time zones, but it’s so segregated and there’s so many different levels of communication before you actually get anything done. Now, if we want to do something, we can do it in 15 minutes. Someone’s awake somewhere in the world, whether it’s me in London, Toby in Los Angeles, Holt and all the guys wherever they are in the world, whether it’s Miami or wherever they’re touring. We don’t need to go through the beauracracy of getting four or five approvals and sign-offs.”

For an independent artist to have their own festival is also a rare sight, and the team hopes John Summit can inspire other artists out in the world. Summit himself used to work as an accountant, his music career taking off while living at his parents’ house around Chicago during the height of COVID. With 17 headline reports submitted to Pollstar’s Boxoffice, Summit has sold 137,066 tickets, grossing $10.2 million. In June, he kicked off his residency at Hï Ibiza.

“This is an artist throwing his own independent festival,” Weston says. “It’s something super rare to see and something that, in our industry, just doesn’t happen anymore when you have large key players monopolizing a lot of the markets across the U.S. With that in mind, I think it’s an opportunity to show the 16-year-old bedroom producer in Wisconsin that anything is possible. This is a big opportunity and a big moment to hopefully shift the thinking around some of the corporate structure that exists in the music industry right now, and to really give hope and chance to some of the younger generation that anything is possible here.”

The team says they’re not going to bite off more than they can chew with this first edition, testing the waters and hoping to scale it with time. They’re sticking with two days rather than three, and minimizing the number of stages, with a capacity of 25,000 per day. Their goal is to provide a great experience at the baseline level for the festival, and slowly increase on top of it as they continue to pull the event off.

“Longevity is super important with this,” Will Weston, Event Manager at Experts Only, says. “In the planning process, we understand we have these grand ideas and these big visions, but being realistic with how we execute them in year one is super important. Maintaining the focus on fan experience first, and when working through budgets and concepts we need to focus on what we can provide year one for an excellent fan experience. It’s not just about doing a festival and doing a party, it’s about designing a world. We want this world to encapsulate the city as a whole and the spirit of New York.”

To amplify the fan experience, Experts Only will feature a space for fans to connect with one another with interactive games, photo moments, and a place for cards to help set up a pen-pal system. The Lodge, which has appeared at various Experts Only events at Factory Town and Toe Jam, will appear at the festival with a larger footprint.

“Sometimes, when artists get as big as John, there’s a disconnect between community,” Bendavid says. “Community is always at the core of what we do. Being able to throw a festival and put every consideration back to the fans, whether it’s an art installation, a sponsor – it’s less about us and more about how can we make an experience for them feel so special in the same way that it is for John and myself and everyone on this team. There are so many core memories from going to festivals that stick with you forever, and that is the most important part of why we’re doing this. I think that’s what I’m most excited about.”

Presale registration is open now, with presale beginning at 10 a.m. ET on July 11. General onsale begins July 11 at 12 p.m. ET, with GA pricing starting at $119.99, VIP tickets starting at $299.99 and Platinum tickets at $799.99.