The year was 1999 and three business partners – Russel Faibisch, Ray Navarro, and Alex Omes – were faced with a difficult decision. Their debut festival ‘The Beach’ had, by at least one metric, been a huge success, drawing in crowd numbers that stretched all the way to five digits. Meanwhile, financially speaking, the festival had netted a five digit loss.
It was quite the dilemma. Should they risk it all on a second year? Could the next year’s crowds be even bigger?
A quarter of a century on and there’s no questioning the fact that they made the right call. Ultra Music Festival is stronger than ever and 2025 looks set to provide yet more incredible thrills for dance lovers.
Ultra Music Festival has had four venues over the years, each of which has posed its own unique challenges. That said, if Ultra can be said to have a permanent home then it’s Bayfront Park, Downtown Miami.
Finding A Home
For its second year, Ultra music festival returned to their original venue at Collins Park where, just as the organisers had hoped, they met with an even bigger crowd. In fact, the crowds were so big that by 2001 it was clear they needed somewhere that could support more people and that’s where the festival ran into their second big difficulty.
Ultra Music Festival has had four venues over the years, each of which has posed its own unique challenges. That said, if Ultra can be said to have a permanent home then it’s Bayfront Park, Downtown Miami.
Ever increasing attendance has seen the festival bounce all over the city but twice now it’s returned to Bayfront. This is because, of all the venues tried, Bayfront is the only one that can adequately meet the challenges of both crowd size and transport without causing major disruption to the rest of the city.
COVID Cancellation
After another difficult venue change in 2019, Ultra 2020 was set to once again return to Bayfront Park but now the festival finally ran into a problem they simply couldn’t work around.
Five years on, the impact of the COVID pandemic is still being felt across countless industries. While much of the music industry has now returned to how things were before the pandemic, many events that were forced to shut down during those years didn’t weather the storm.
Fortunately for us, Ultra Miami might just be too big to fail. While 2020 and 2021 represent the only two years in the festival’s history during which they’ve been forced to cancel the event entirely, 2022 saw a massive return to form with delighted artists and producers finally able to speak face to face again. The music industry was back on its feet and Ultra Music Festival was the place to be.
The Present & Future of Ultra Music Festival
These days Ultra hosts more than ten times as many people as it did back in 1999 and the event has long since gone international with regular festivals across six continents.
As for Miami, it’s an event the dance music industry looks forward to every year as an amazing chance for artists and fans from all over the world to come together and celebrate great music.
