Where He Is: John Summit Takes Dance Music To Dizzying New Heights

On Nov. 14, John Summit will do what he usually does before he DJs: Up until 10 minutes before showtime, he’ll lock in and go over his set. He’ll take two shots of tequila for nerves and then make his way to his gear. He laughs and describes the performance as the easy part, the work going into each show takes up most of his time as he tweaks each record until it’s perfect, changing up songs to give fans something that’s a bit different. But this show, more than others, is bigger. He’ll be making his Kia Forum debut – not for just one night, but for three consecutive nights.

“My biggest challenge with the Forum is I always try to be bigger and better with everything, cause I’ve been doing this nonstop,” Summit says.

Becky Colwell, GM of Kia Forum and VP of Music & Events at Intuit Dome, adds, “Insomniac produces some of the biggest electronic music events in the world, and John Summit is one of the biggest electronic artists, so it’s a perfect pairing and we’re grateful that they chose us to host these shows. We have a strong history with EDM shows, but this is our first three-night stand for a single artist in this genre and we are proud that they chose us for his return to Los Angeles.”

That explains how they came to book Summit for three nights. He is in no way a flash in the pan. He played Madison Square Garden in July and, the previous December, he sold out 22,000-capacity BMO Stadium. He also had major festival plays like Lolla-
palooza, Ultra Music Festival, Coachella and Electric Daisy Carnival. While the success of Summit, who is 30 years old,
may seem out of the blue to some, he’s actually spent more than a decade assiduously honing his craft and steadily building his career.

While attending the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, John Summit would often drive two hours north to Chicago to attend underground raves. Though he wasn’t yet old enough to get into clubs, he was determined to find ways to see his favorite artists perform. Chicago, a house music mecca, has long had a thriving dance music scene, and Summit would check out the scene’s legends, including Green Velvet and Kaskade. Summit found himself locked in and harbored aspirations to become one of the world’s foremost tech house and techno DJs.

After graduation, Summit got the one job that might be the exact antithesis of club DJ: accountant.

“I was a bad worker on purpose, because I didn’t have the balls to leave myself,” Summit admits. “I was a really bad employee until they kicked me out the door. I saved up around $5,000 and tried to live off that as long as possible.”

With little interest in his day job, Summit began recording music and getting bookings for shows outside of Chicago. His manager, Holt Harmon at Metatone Management, was introduced to Summit at the time through a mutual friend and client. The two were working on a record together, and Summit was still more of a hobbyist than a full-fledged producer. Harmon and his partner, Parker Cohen, started diving into Summit’s records and knew they’d found something special.

Summit would leave accounting after a year and a half and, while living in his parents’ basement, began producing music every day. MusiCares helped pay his rent for a couple months. He used the lockdown in 2020 to work nonstop, making music 16 hours a day and sending out demos.

During that time, his songs started going viral on TikTok. Social media allowed him to rapidly gain an audience; Summit was a frequent poster on all social media platforms (particularly on X, formerly known as Twitter) and would respond to comments. His high level of engagement allowed his audience to know him better, creating a round-the-clock and growing feedback loop.

When Daisy Hoffman, Summit’s agent at Wasserman Music, first discovered Summit, she knew she needed to sign him right away. They met over Zoom in June 2020, Hoffman talking to him from her New York City rooftop. He was having a moment with his song “Deep End,” (which currently has 51.8 million plays on Spotify) one of his first big records, which remained No. 1 on Beatport for months. She brought on agent Ben Shprits, and the two of them quickly realized they had a generational artist on their hands.

“I had a tip from a friend – he knew Holt from a long time ago,” Hoffman says. “I’ve been working in house and techno for a while, and my friend was like, ‘You have to listen to this. This is going to blow your mind.’ I listened one time through and was like, ‘We got to get on this now.’”

He came out of the jump with festival plays after the world reopened. Hoffman and Shprits explained that by being a domestic act he was able to get a bit of a head start. By 2022, John Summit was becoming dance music’s next superstar. He headlined the Perry Stage at Lollapalooza, with his entire family, high school friends and network in attendance.

“That was my first time doing this whole intro and I think it was the first time I ever did a production show, meaning my first time bringing my own stage and stuff,” Summit says. “It was a very small mountain, like a summit (pun not intended) that looked like a three-year-old made it with Legos. From then to now, the stage production we have is just insane. But that was when I realized, ‘Oh, I can bring an actual show and not just show up to a club and plug in my USB like I’ve been doing since my college days.’”

Since the lockdowns were lifted, Summit plays an average of 150+ shows per year and “is not stopping anytime soon.” The level of production on his shows has increased exponentially.

His dates at San Francisco’s Cow Palace Oct. 18-19 featured a 360 stage design that weighed several tons. His stage at Madison Square Garden on June 29 featured a similar 360 design, fit with lasers and a futuristic look. The latter sold out with 15,636 fans in attendance and grossed $1.5 million, with tickets averaging from $29 to $299.

Nov. 14-16, Summit will take on his biggest single concert residency to date when he plays three nights at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California. With a 17,500 capacity, that’s potentially more than 50,000 fans, or really, a stadium play.

If Summit’s Garden show is any indication, then Summit’s Forum plays will be epic. He spent months working on his set for MSG, which clocked in around five hours and represented different elements of his career.

The first hour was tech house, which predominated Summit’s early sounds. He next did an hour and a half, back-to-back set with Chicago’s Green Velvet, one of his earliest inspirations. (“It was an honor for him to play with me, and him being a Chicago legend,” Summit said.) Summit then went into a two-hour set from his new album, Comfort In Chaos, released July 12 via his label, Experts Only/Darkroom.

Summit explains he wanted his MSG show to highlight his entire evolution throughout his career. “That first set, there was no production,” Summit says. “Every light was on in the arena, it was literally just me. By the end, it would require an army to pull it off. The pyro effects, lighting, visual design, stage hands, everything. That’s a big difference over the past couple of years, it started with just me and then two managers, and now we have this massive team.”

Wasserman Music’s Shprits adds, “He really understands the presentation. He’s always talked about how he wants to bring this massive production to this world that typically exists within warehouses with a strobe light and a really great sound system. He’s always focused on delivering a quality experience. At Cow Palace, it’s a proper 360, not an end stage 360, and the stage itself is motorized and turns. He’s always pushing the limits, trying to figure out how to surprise his fans and do things different. It’s apparent in the results.”

Hoffman and Shprits took that first meeting with Summit to reverse engineer the next five years of his career market by market. He has a large following in college towns, with Arizona often pulling in high grosses. Summit also has a clear vision of where he sees the project going, allowing his agents to clearly line out their plans. Thus far, Summit has surpassed their goals, making them look even further ahead.

While Summit had landmark performances like Madison Square Garden, three sellouts at Chicago’s Northerly Island (the only artist other than Phish to achieve that goal) and his upcoming dates at the Kia Forum, he still keeps his toes in the underground dance music scene. He’ll throw parties in each city he plays in, such as a boat party through the Hudson and East River the same weekend as his MSG play. He’ll fill his lineups with artists he respects and admires, such as Green Velvet.

Harmon explains when he and Summit first started, they never expected the project to become bigger than club culture. They approach each show as an experience first, aiming to be the perfect form of escapism. As Summit gets more popular, they maintain that original passion, working to bring it to a wider audience.

“We try not to skip steps as agents,” Shprits says. “We try to build very strong foundations. But, with an artist like John, when you see such massive growth and you’ve laid out the base of it, I think there are moments where you need to swing. We’ve tried to be very calculated with where we’ve taken those swings. Obviously, Madison Square Garden was a huge moment. BMO Stadium in Los Angeles toward the end of last year was a massive solo headline moment for him. We’ve really tried to use precision and touch markets where we have strong, active audiences who are really asking for him.”

With so much of Summit’s fanbase college students, he and his team work to ensure ticket prices are affordable. Even his biggest dates have some seats priced at $40, allowing fans on more of a budget to have a chance to attend.

His record label, Experts Only, also lets fans catch him at more intimate venues while giving up-and-coming artists an opportunity to perform. The label brand travels across the country with its artists joining Summit on the road. Summit and Harmon created Experts Only so they could have fewer restrictions around what sort of music he could release, allowing his sets to have more range. And, for artists just starting out, Summit wanted to present opportunities for them to perform despite market saturation and so many record releases. For emerging artists, it can be difficult finding opportunities to perform outside of their hometowns. Much in the same way Summit was given opportunities by his mentors, he wants to pay that forward with Experts Only. He’ll highlight his label’s talent throughout his upcoming Forum shows, with the full lineup yet to be announced.

Around 48 different artists have released music on Experts Only, which is distributed through Defected Records (distributed through ADA/Warner). Among those who’ve released songs on the label includes Danny Avila, Alterboy, Max Styler, Layton Giordani and more.

“What’s cool about these big shows is I can put all these acts on my lineup,” Summit says. “The Forum is going to be pretty much all Experts Only acts. It’s almost like I’m doing a mini festival. I give them production, sound, everything. I want it to be a party, start to finish. That’s my real passion project at the moment, because I don’t really make money on it, either.”

Summit and his team are looking to expand their footprint globally. He’s already a frequent performer in Ibiza, Spain’s famed Balearic island dance music paradise, and he performed at Australia’s Hangout Festival earlier this year.

“We’ve had intentions of planting seeds in Asia and going down to Latin America and formulating a long-term strategy in Europe where we can bring all these markets to scale,” Shprits says. “Most artists having the success they have in one place can struggle with building other places to that scale. Because you’re seeing the success in America, why go to someplace where you’re starting at the bottom? I think we’ve done a very good job of spreading the strategy globally and bringing all these markets up to a level where it’s happened in a way that feels very much in sync. To see a rise from 2020 to 2024 in such a short window to headlining stadiums and arenas, he’s a unicorn artist.”

Harmon says Summit has that special touch, a perfect storm of an artist that’s propelled him to the highest rankings of dance music in a quick manner.

“John has a bit of everything that people look for,” Harmon says. “He’s as good a song selector as I’ve been around in my life. He’s somebody who understands the music and understands what people are looking for. That’s why he’s such a great A&R, he knows what people are looking for. There’s an energy tip that he seems to hit on with those things. He really knows what he’s doing from a brand standpoint.”

Summit has been dialed in for his upcoming dates at the Forum. While Madison Square Garden was a landmark, expanding to three nights sets a new challenge.

“He wants to bring different music than what people saw at MSG, especially after we got the stream up online and people know what that’s all about,” Harmon says. “The biggest difference between the two would be from a music standpoint. The production is going to have those standout elements that feel different. I don’t think there’s many people that will go to both, so we’re in the clear there, but it’s trying to make something different that can stand out and live in its own place separate from Madison Square Garden. This way, Kia Forum is just as much of a moment.”