Q&A: Tomorrowland Co-Founder Michiel Beers On The Debut Of Unity

Forbes

4 hours ago

In terms of global music festivals, Belgium's electronic dance Tomorrowland is one of the most prestigious and largest events in the world. Held over two weekends in July, the festival attracts roughly 200,000 fans per weekend for a total of 400,000 attendees each year.
However, for co-founder Michiel Beers, who started the festival with his brother, Manu, in 2005, creating one of the largest music festivals was just the preface to his Tomorrowland story.
The story takes many detours, including some unexpected ones, like Tomorrowland Furniture, their award-winning design offshoot. The next chapter in the Tomorrowland novel is Unity, a collaboration between the festival and Insomniac, the Pasquale Rotella-founded promoter behind Electric Daisy Carnival, among others.
Held in Las Vegas at The Sphere August 29 – 31, September 19, 20, 26, 27 and October 17 and 18, the groundbreaking teaming between the two titans of live electronic music will feature Kaskade, Slander, Eli Brown, Subtronics and more.
I spoke with Michiel Beers about all things Tomorrowland related, from what prompted the furniture to those artists who have grown with the festival.
Steve Baltin: How are you doing today?
Michiel Beers: I'm good, all good. We're building the festival in Belgium. In 10 days, it's Tomorrowland. We're here with the whole team.
Baltin: I know from friends who run U.S. festivals, it is a year-round proposition preparing for the festival.
Beers: Yeah, it's almost working two years out. And our creative director said today, in a meeting, we're now almost ready with the first ideas and first sketches for 27. With the size of the stages we're creating it's very important. We also had to learn that by running against the wall sometimes, but now we work almost two years up front for the next edition. Not for everything, of course, but for the big stages, it's really important if you want to keep on raising the bar to do that.
Baltin: I imagine when you do something like Unity, that brings in a whole different set of challenges. Is it fun to be able to challenge yourself in new ways like that?
Beers: Yeah, we took a few crazy challenges the last year and Unity is definitely one of them. We always did content creation, but I think in COVID when we started the digital festivals, in Tomorrowland, that was somehow our wanton leap in creating high-end content and we kept evolving. And that really resulted in what we can do in Sphere, but Sphere is the size of the screen, the resolution of the screen, the expectations, what you have to bring to people in terms of world building and crazy visuals. That's, of course, another level and very complex, but we're working on it for a year now. And I think the end result will be beyond amazing. I'm also really proud and even surprised we can bring it to this very high level.
Baltin: What were you looking for in the people that opened Unity?
Beers: We're really proud Kaskade wanted to play the first weekend. We also have him in Belgium again this year. So, it will be good to see him here. And yes, there will be a combination. We will do it together with Insomniac and in the first two hours of the show, we will dive into the Tomorrowland and Insomniac worlds, but we'll have some kind of a symphonic orchestra on stage. It will not be a symphonic show, only beautiful moments in this soundtrack. And then the end show will be one we create with one big artist. So yeah, it's not comparable with the festival, it's something new we create and I think if you now see the four hours it's going to be, people won't get bored for one second. I think they will be amazed the whole four hours from one going into another.
Baltin: Have you been to Sphere before yet, by the way?
Beers: Yeah, of course, 'From Postcards, From Earth' and Anyma to Dead and Co and Phish. We saw a lot of shows there to really feel and see what has impact, what works, how fast can you go with movements. We wanted to really learn what our own shows should look like. I don't think you can create a show that is fair without really experiencing it yourself because it's such a special venue.
Baltin: I love that because what I found from interviewing all successful people, whether you're an artist or a CEO, all successful people have an internal fire. You're not challenging yourself based on what's happening in the outer world you're challenging yourself based on what it is that you want to do.
Beers: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's also the beauty of working together with Insomniac, we know each other for many years. We have a lot of respect for each other. But now we're really working together and we're two companies that are used to having two creative companies but now we both have it, and we need to work together and that works really amazing. We're very respectful of each other, we challenge each other in a positive way, we get the best out of each other, we learn from each other, it's really been until now an inspiring process how you work with somebody in the scene you haven't worked with before, but one that also does similar and really crazy things. So, yeah, even apart from doing this first show itself, I think that's really the beauty of Unity getting to work together with Insomniac on a project. It's inspiring.
Baltin: The world now is so much smaller so I imagine you now share audiences in a way you never would have before.
Beers: Yeah, absolutely. I don't think we see each other as competition. We see each other as two companies that are passionate about electronic music and it's just great working together.
Baltin: I was talking about the internal challenge. Like I said I've known everybody here in LA who puts on festivals. No one here has expanded into furniture. Where the hell did that come from?
Beers: The last few years we were already working on furniture, for almost three years. The reason why is because we got a lot of requests like "Can Tomorrowland do a hotel?" "Can Tomorrowland do a resort?" "Can Tomorrowland do a day club?" And we always try to build magical worlds where people step in, and they're indulged into Tomorrowland in every little detail. And we were thinking like, 'Yeah, we know what this is for a festival, but for a hotel, it's different. We need to create a new name that people will recognize over time.' But if they step into a place that we designed they really feel that everything is tomorrow. We started an architectural company a few years ago with a super talented Belgian architect and first we had to look for what is our design style, what is it to translate it into architecture, and for us it's kind of a contemporary Art Nouveau collection, and Art Nouveau is a very famous architectural style, which was really big in Belgium like 100 years ago. And to bring that into the 21st century. Out of that style, we started to design furniture, chairs, tables, sofas, you name it. We started to design pottery. We designed water taps just to step by step build a universe within design objects. We're not there yet, but it keeps growing. We look for really good partners that are very enthusiastic to work with us because we can design beautiful things, but, of course, we're not a company that makes furniture, we're not a company that makes pottery. So, we found really good partners for us that are very enthusiastic. And last April, in Salone del Mobile, which is the biggest furniture fair in the world, and at ICFF in New York, we presented the collection. Everybody's really enthusiastic. Like in New York, we got four awards, which was a big surprise and really amazing. So now we have distributors all over the world and we're producing the furniture. From August or September, on one hand, it will be for sale to audiences, and, on the other hand, we will use it in a lot of our future projects. So, it's not that we create furniture to create furniture, we created furniture to build magical worlds for the next years to come in a lot of different projects we're planning.
Baltin: Does doing things like furniture keep it interesting for you? Then is it important it still feeds into the festival, which is the main part of Tomorrowland?
Beers: Yes, that's really correct. One hundred percent, all these new projects keep it very challenging, keep us very passionate. But we still want to make sure that everything connects, that everything is related to the storytelling, to the festival, and that we don't start to do projects that people don't get anymore, that it's too far from our core. So yeah, we have Tomorrowland, we have the festival, it's something we cherish so much and we want to give all our attention. But it's really fun and it's really interesting to keep on evolving. Also, we're a first-generation brand so it's also interesting to see how far we can push this brand, how far we can bring it into people's lives and still be meaningful to them. We don't have a book here with all our next steps for us. Also a lot of the times we follow our gut feeling, try to come up with new things we love to roll into and then discover where we end.
Baltin: Who are those two or three artists that you feel are most synonymous with Tomorrowland through the years?
Beers: I can't name two. I think it's a whole generation of artists. We booked a lot of artists from day one, from David Guetta to Paul Kalkbrenner, to a lot of names that back then were really small and then suddenly electronic music exploded around 2010 and we all grew together and everybody's still around today. Same with Steve Aoki, he played on a very small stage the first years, but now he's still with us. Yeah, there's Swedish House Mafia, there's Dimitri From Paris, there's Armin [Van Buuren] and so many new artists along all those years that started small when we were small and we grew together. We keep that mutual respect for each other and I think artists embrace our creativity and we embrace the importance of all those names and the gratitude to come every year to Tomorrowland. We were on a journey for a long time together.