Tomorrowland: all about the biggest music festival in the world

​Last year Tomorrowland, the biggest music festival in the world, was on everyone's lips. After two years of inactivity due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it returned stronger than ever.

If you do not know what it is, we will tell you a little about its history. Tomorrowland had its first edition in the distant 2005, specifically on August 11 of that year, thanks to the efforts of the Belgian brothers Manu and Michiel Beers. They had the idea of holding a music festival near the municipality of Boom, in Belgium.

In its beginnings it was very far from what we see today, its settings were humble and there were no mythological and fantastic themes like today. It was not until its third edition that it began to last two days instead of just one.

Scenarios and themes

It wasn't until Tomorrowland 2009 that the tradition of the theme was born and as the editions have passed it has become a core part of the event. The themes that have involved each edition are:

By the year 2022 the festival had a total of 15 simultaneous stages:

• Mainstage
• Freedom
• Mesa Garden
• Harbour House
• Cage
• The Rave Cave
• Rose Garden
• Youphoria
• Leaf
• Kara Savi
• Atmosphere
• Core
• Crystal Garden
• The Library
• Moose Bar

Attendance

For the 2022 edition, all attendance records from previous years were broken, achieving a total of approximately 650,000 people who participated in this music festival.

Around 200 different nationalities congregate in the place, all united by music, which gives us a sample of the power it has to unite people and put aside their differences.

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How to go to Tomorrowland?

The first thing you should know is that the sale of tickets is done in stages and with different prices for each one:

• Top 20
  • Tomorrowland guarantees a ticket for you and up to 3 more friends if you are one of the first 20 in your country to complete the mandatory pre-registration.
• Global Journey
  • Buying your ticket through Global Journey is the easiest way to buy your ticket to go to Tomorrowland. Global Journey are travel packages that the festival sells from various cities around the world with the bus, train or plane ticket included and they take care of taking you to Tomorrowland.
• Belgian Sale
  • Although this sale is only for Belgian nationals, it's still an opportunity if for some reason you have a Belgian friend who also thinks of attending.
• Presale
  • At this sales stage, tickets are cheaper, but also limited. Since 2020, a faster sales system has been implemented that verifies all connected accounts 90 seconds before, penalizes those who have several tabs open in the same browser, and places you in a virtual queue.
• General sale
  • As in the pre-sale, what you must do is enter the store at least 2 minutes before to verify your account and you also have only 7 minutes to complete the purchase.

The prices vary a lot, since there are single day passes from 110 euros (around 2,300MXN) to the Full Madness pass that allows you to enter a whole weekend for an amount of up to 535 euros (around 11,200MXN), these passes do not include lodging.

The festival informs at the end of the year when the event will take place and the dates on which you can pre-register and purchase tickets, generally between the months of February to May.

Where to stay for Tomorrowland?

There are several options to stay in Boom, Belgium for the Tomorrowland festival. The festival itself has a space for all those people who want to camp near the festival, of course for an extra price at the entrance.

This space created by the organizers is called Dreamville, where up to 40,000 people stay per day and has an extension of more than 2 kilometers. You can find different accommodation options:

• Magnificent greens, festival access and camping at Dreamville
• Magnificent greens 1P Tent gives you access to the festival and they give you a tent to pitch.
• Easy Tent gives access to the festival in a more exclusive area where your tent is already set up, ready for use and on pallets.
• Dream Lodge gives access to the festival and a small cabin for two people.
• Cabin gives you access to the festival and a much larger cabin with electrical hookups and all the amenities.
• Theme Hotels, also give access to the festival and are located in the downtown area of Brussels.

If you are interested in spending less then you can find hotels or accommodation in:

• The city of Boom though is very difficult due to high demand during the festival dates.
• Near cities:
  • Antwerp, 17km away.
  • Mechelen, 14km away.
  • Brussels, 20km away.

During COVID-19

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that has plagued the world for the past few years, the Tomorrowland festival had to be cancelled, which was a huge financial hit for the organizers.

Seeking to lessen the negative impact, in 2020 and 2021 they decided to hold a virtual version of the event with DJs such as David Guetta, Martin Garrix, Steve Aoki, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike and Amelie Lens. In order to simulate the real atmosphere in a digital environment, they filmed new sets on 6x8x8 meter green screens, in four different locations: Sao Paulo, Sydney, Los Angeles and Boom itself. They also created the immersive virtual world called Pāpiliōnem, which users could explore from their computers.

One of the big technical challenges was translating the green screen footage into a mobile virtual world at scale, where six 4K cameras could be combined with 38 virtual cameras to get wide shots of the 280,000 virtual festival goers, all Camera and lens parameters were transmitted live to servers that recorded the data and generated a low-resolution version of the virtual world, for use by camera operators and directors. Along with the technical setup, the artist's lighting changed depending on the location of the virtual stage and the time of day during the broadcast.

Fortunately, more than 1 million viewers watched the festival virtually in 2020, which indicates that all the effort made was a success.

Aftermovie Tomorrowland

A couple of weeks after the event ends, the organization publishes a video with the most representative moments of the festival, this is known as an aftermovie. Since 2005 to date, this video has been made so that everyone can see the experience of being in Tomorrowland.

As time has passed, the production of aftermovies has improved, also serving as a publicity piece and attracting even more people to the event.

Controversies in Tomorrowland

One of the strongest controversies that took place in Tomorrowland was during the 2018 edition. The singer Bad Bunny took the stage during the presentation of the Swedish DJ Alesso to sing I like it, the song he produced with Cardi B and J Balvin. No more than a few minutes passed and the claims on social networks were noted, criticizing the singer, the DJ and the organization since they did not understand the presence of the famous reggaeton artist on stage.

This is not the first time that reggaeton has played in Tomorrowland, in 2016 the Belgians Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike put a song by Daddy Yankee in the middle of their presentation. Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike surprised those attending the festival in the city of Boom, in the north of Belgium, by presenting their version of "Gasolina".

And in 2019 Daddy Yankee played again, now with Natti Natasha with the song "Instagram", which was performed by Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike themselves, now in collaboration with David Guetta, Daddy Yankee, Afro Bros and Natti Natasha.

Also present when playing the song were the song's collaborators, David Guetta and Afro Bros.

Now you know a little more about the biggest and most spectacular music festival in the world, Tomorrowland. Would you like to go and live the experience of this event? Have you been to Tomorrowland yet?

Share your experiences in the comments.