This is Tomorrowland. Granted, the photo above was taken a few years ago in 2017, but it was the most colourful one I could find.
Although I’ve never been to the holy grounds of Boom, Antwerp,Belgium, I did watch the live streams religiously when they were streaming the festivals (there are multiple events) throughout the year.
They have won multiple awards including International Dance Music Awards the Best Music Event for 7 years running.
Started in 2005 by We Are One World, with just 9,000 Attendees and 9 DJs on one day in August, it’s grown to have 400,000 attendances with 91 Djs over 2 weekends, not including Tomorrowland Winter. Now-a-days, tickets usually sell out in minutes, with a whole variety of people attending.
It wasn’t until 2007 that they started putting the festival on for two days, with legends like David Guetta & Paul van Dyk performing on the main stage.
In 2008, they presented more than 100 DJ’s and over 50,000 attendees.
In 2009, they started using themes for the festival, and that year’s was “Masker”, relating to masks.
In 2014, they seem to have tested the two weekend thing and went from 180,000 attendees to 360,000, with the theme of The Key to Happiness. They also started Tomorrowland Brazil, which would later become Tomorrowland Unite (I think) where there is multiple events around the world live streaming the show from Belgium, and also some other live DJ’s. There is still nothing in the UK though…
In 2015, the theme was The Secret Kingdom of Melodia, and 2016 was The Elixir of Life. They only did one weekend for these years and I always wanted it to go back to the two-weekend festival. In 2017, they made it a two weekend festive permanently. 🙂
Also in 2017, at a Unite Festival In Barcelona, Spain, there was an incident where the stage burst into flames. There is no official reason why it happened but there’s speculation that a faulty pyrotechnic item was the cause. From the best of my knowledge there was only minor injuries.
Also in 2017, the event became the biggest social media hyped music festival in the world with over 1.2 Billion views from over 200 million people. Also, King Philippe and Queen Mathilde of Belgium visited the festival.
2018 was a big year, when they released Tomorrowland Winter, in Alpe d’Huez in the French alps and the theme was The Hymn of the Frozen Lotus.
Also in that same year, Avicii (born Tim Bergling) died (RIP). Some of the attendees brought a huge flag measuring 16 by 10 meters and weighing about 20 kilograms. This mammoth flag came out in the stands when there was an Avicii tribute on the main-stage.
In August of 2019, they announced that they were bringing Tomorrowland Winter back for 2020. Can you guess what happened? It got cancelled due to the pandemic in march 2020 due to restrictions by the French government.
I’m not sure when they started live streaming, but it must have been on or before 2012 when I started watching it on YouTube. The theme was the Book Of Wisdom. At this point, I didn’t know how much of a fan boy I would turn into, but ended up watching every one ever since.
This and last year, because of the ongoing pandemic, the actual festivals have been cancelled, but they’re doing a digital festival called Around The World, which took place on July 25th & 26th 2020 on Tomorrowland.com, with some of my favourite artists playing including, Alan Walker, Armin van Buuren, Nervo, and more (and that’s just on the main stage of the first day).
P.S I wrote this article a while back for one of my friends website Uru Tunes and I spent a long time on this so I thought I would repost it on my site.