New Media, New Festival Worlds: Rethinking Cultural Events and Televisuality through YouTube and the Tomorrowland Music Festival

This chapter examines the transition of televisual mediations of music festivals in the social media landscape of the 2010s as a complex mediatization process with far-reaching implications for festival cultures and industries. A case study of the Tomorrowland festival in Belgium illustrates how this broader transformation is happening for electronic dance music (EDM) festivals, which mushroomed in the 2000s, when a mix of EDM and Top 40 songs came to dominate pop culture images of the millennial generation. The core argument is that the transformation of televisuality in the transition to social media like YouTube and digital culture more generally has happened primarily through a new genre of cinematic online video, which is produced for marketing purposes but also has implications for the festival experience and digital festival design. These festival marketing movies expand the Disney-derived festival design and the millennial culture of self- mediations within a new information economy.