The Music Festival Blog
Caribana Toronto 2026: Complete Guide to North America's Largest Caribbean Carnival
The Grand Parade at Toronto Caribbean Carnival does not begin gradually. One moment you are standing on Lakeshore Boulevard watching the empty road, and the next moment there is a...
Notting Hill Carnival 2026: Complete Guide to Europe's Largest Street Festival
Ladbroke Grove at carnival time smells of jerk chicken before you can see anything. The smoke from the oil drum barbecues that line the pavements is the first signal that...
Oktoberfest 2026: Complete Guide to the Munich Beer Festival
The first thing you notice at the Theresienwiese is the sound. Before you enter the tent, before you lift a Stein, before the oompah band launches into its third consecutive...
HARD Summer 2026: Complete Guide to LA's Biggest Electronic Festival
Hollywood Park is not a traditional festival venue. It is a 300-acre entertainment complex built around SoFi Stadium in Inglewood — flat, urban, surrounded by the Los Angeles freeway infrastructure...
Dekmantel 2026: Complete Guide to Amsterdam's Underground Electronic Festival
There is a particular quality to Dekmantel that becomes clear only after you have been once. It is not the lineup — although the lineup is extraordinary. It is not...
Burning Man 2026: Complete Guide to Black Rock City Axis Mundi
The Black Rock Desert is not a festival venue. It is a playa — an ancient dry lakebed in the high desert of northwestern Nevada, flat and white and cracked...
Lollapalooza Chicago 2026: Complete Guide to Grant Park July 30-August 2
Grant Park sits between the Chicago Loop and Lake Michigan, which is one of the great urban accidents in American geography. A city that could have turned its back to...
WorldPride Amsterdam 2026: Complete Guide to Canal Parade & Events
On April 1, 2001, the Netherlands became the first country on earth to legalise same-sex marriage. The ceremony took place in Amsterdam at midnight, presided over by the city’s mayor,...
Sensation Amsterdam 2026: Complete Guide to the White Dress Code Festival
The dress code is the first thing anyone tells you about Sensation: everyone wears white. Not festival-white, not off-white, not “I found a white shirt.” White. The Johan Cruijff Arena...
Comic-Con San Diego 2026: Complete Guide to SDCC July 23-26
The first thing that hits you at San Diego Comic-Con is not the scale of the convention centre or the length of the Hall H queue. It is the cosplay...
Tomorrowland 2026: Complete Guide to Belgium's CONSCIENCIA Festival
De Schorre is a recreation area in the municipality of Boom, roughly 25 kilometres south of Antwerp, and for fifty weeks of the year it is a forest and parkland...
Electric Castle 2026: Complete Guide to Romania's Banffy Castle Festival
The Bánffy Castle sits in the village of Bonþida, 27 kilometres north of Cluj-Napoca, and it is genuinely crumbling in places. The 15th-century Transylvanian castle has been under restoration for...
