The Top 100 Festivals of 2025, as voted by DJ Mag readers

This is the fifth year that DJ Mag has presented the Top 100 Festivals list, with a record-breaking number of votes recorded in the poll once again.

Top 100 Festivals first started in 2019, when winners were selected by a panel of DJs. After a brief hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the poll returned in 2022 with votes being opened up to the public for the first time. Increased numbers have been recorded every year since, and, in 2025, votes came from every corner of the globe, from North and South America to Europe, Asia, Oceania and Africa. In the list below, you’ll find festivals spanning a wide range of electronic music styles, from EDM and hard dance favourites with jaw-dropping production to major house and techno events and underground staples with a sound-system focus.

But the landscape for festivals is changing rapidly, and has become increasingly fraught with challenges. In 2024, a record 78 UK festivals cancelled, postponed or called time on their event entirely according to the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF). That followed the 172 events that ceased operations completely between 2019 and 2024. So far, in 2025, 39 UK festivals have been forced to cancel or postpone. The AIF recently set up the Fallow Festival Fund to help support events that have taken a year out in 2025 in order “to figure out what they need to do differently to make their events work in this new climate”.

In a period of constant flux for the festival economy, where major companies and investors vie for monopoly, conversations around private equity, crowd safety and environmentalism have been pulled into sharper relief than ever before. Fans, industry initiatives and artists alike have increasingly made their voices heard in the hope of maintaining a scene that is sustainable and aligns with electronic music’s core values. In recent months, following the acquisition of entertainment company Superstruct, the owner of over 80 festivals worldwide, by investment company KKR, events have been met with artist withdrawals and calls for boycott over ties to “complicit investments”. These include stakes in weapons manufacturing companies, the Coastal GasLink pipeline, and a number of Israeli corporations that operate in occupied Palestinian territories.

Many festival promoters and attendees have started to demonstrate a desire to reshape the landscape. In May, 46 UK Festivals announced a partnership with War Child, offering free tickets to fans who donate £10 to the Festivals Unite campaign, which aims to help the charity provide support for the 1-in-5 young people affected by conflict globally. Last year, sustainability non-profit A Greener Future (AGF) also reported that 40 festivals in 14 countries had achieved the organisation’s certification for sustainability in 2024. In February, Massive Attack reported “unprecedented” reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from their 2024 climate-action concert, ACT 1.5, setting a new standard for how to effectively run a festival while introducing decarbonisation measures.

While the line-ups of the festivals voted into this year’s list by DJ Mag readers vary drastically, what they share is a capacity to bring music fans together, and, as recent figures have shown, the desire for electronic music of all varieties at festivals the world over has seen a significant increase in recent years. According to the IMS Business Report 2025, the presence of electronic acts on global festival line-ups has risen to 18%, rising from 13% in 2021. 

You can read the full Top 100 Festivals list below, and find out more information and donate to the AIF’s Fallow Festival Fund campaign here.