As ADE Turns 30 This Week, Its Managing Director Reflects on Dance Music as ‘An Emotions Industry’

Esta semana, Jan-Willem van de Ven viajará entre mundos, tudo dentro de um raio de poucos quilômetros no centro de Amsterdã.

ADE 2026 happens in Amsterdam this week, Oct. 21-24.

This Wednesday (Oct. 21), for example, says van de Ven, “by day I go from a panel to a club with 300 people having their own splendid ADE, then I go to the ADE golf tournament, then I go to with the city’s mayor to a performance by the National Ballet, and that’s all in four or five hours.

Van de Ven é diretor‑geral da ADE, ou Amsterdam Dance Event, que celebra seu 30º aniversário nesta semana na capital holandesa. Aqui, o ADE Pro — a trilha de programação para profissionais do setor — sediará 148 painéis, 25 mixers e outras sessões, totalizando 188 programas Pro.

Speakers include representatives from Believe, SoundCloud, Spotify, Insomniac Events, YouTube, EMPIRE and many other labels, agencies, streamers, event brands and more.

Organizers expect 11,000 attendees for the ADE Pro and Lab elements of the event (Lab programming is designed for artists, creatives and professionals looking to get into the industry), along with an astonishing 600,000 fans for ADE’s many club sets, festivals and other consumer-facing events happening across 300 venues.

ADE realmente evoluiu de uma feira comercial para algo maior e mais difícil de definir — um momento em que grande parte da indústria da música eletrônica converge, desde promotores underground até executivos de grandes gravadoras e artistas emergentes, todos na mesma cidade ao mesmo tempo.

The buzz around the city is real, and the sleep is minimal. The idea is for ADE to catalyze new music, new projects, new brands and new innovations, and it has.

Van de Ven recalls one such turning point in 2012 and 2013 when — amid the U. S. dance music boom — more festival brands started hosting major events at big room Amsterdam venues like the Johan Cruijff Arena.

Este ano, o Amsterdam Music Festival, ou AMF, espera cerca de 40. 000 fãs na Johan Cruijff Arena para um line-up que inclui Amelie Lens, David Guetta e Armin van Buuren.

All in, it was a moment that marked a turning point for dance music while also expanding ADE’s own scale. But it’s not just about size and revenue. “I feel like we’re always looking into the economics of night culture, but the baseline of night culture is an emotion industry,” says van de Ven.

Presenting both some of the biggest brands in dance music while also looking at the underground are pillars of the 2026 ADE schedule. AI will be a major focus, as will an expanded social impact track that has grown well beyond its origins as ADE Green, to encompass broader questions of social sustainability in the industry.

Pela primeira vez, a ADE apresenta pesquisa realizada em parceria com a VibeLab, a agência de consultoria e advocacy com sede em Amsterdã que cria relatórios de pesquisa sobre a cultura noturna de cidades individuais para ajudar a proteger suas cenas.

VibeLab will present a report on six global cities including New York, a document van de Ven hopes will arm the industry with data that can make the case for supporting and subsidizing nightlife to local politicians and government agencies.

This VibeLab research represents a deliberate reframing of how van de Ven thinks the industry should talk about itself. Rather than leading with economic impact figures, the standard metric used to justify nightlife’s existence to city governments and policymakers, the research attempts to measure something more elusive: what night culture actually means to the cities it inhabits, and what those cities would lose without it.

Esta filosofia se estende à forma como a ADE projeta sua própria programação. O cronograma de 2026 inclui a Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra apresentando Beethoven sob uma instalação artística em grande escala do artista Boris Acket, que acontecerá na quarta-feira (Oct.

21), the same day as Swan Lake Remixed, a performance with the Dutch National Ballet. It’s the kind of programming that has no obvious commercial logic but speaks to ADE’s belief that electronic music belongs in conversations with every other form of culture, rather than being siloed from it.

Thirty years in, van de Ven is still most energized by the version of ADE that can’t be easily categorized — the golf tournament that becomes a networking session, the club night that becomes a career-defining show, the panel discussion that sparks an idea in the audience.

He hopes every ADE attendee can find their own version of the event across its many offerings.

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