John Summit is bringing a new electronic festival to New York, with the superstar DJ unveiling the first-ever Experts Only Festival NYC on Monday.
Experts Only, which bears the name of Summit’s Experts Only record label, will take place Sept. 20-21 on Randall’s Island and will have Summit headlining both nights with a supporting cast including Kaskade, Cassian, Green Velvet, Layton Giordani, LP Giobbi, Kasablanca, Ayybo and Roddy Lima, among others. The full lineup is below.
As Summit tells The Hollywood Reporter, he’s looking for Experts Only to “fill the gap” in the largest market in the country. New York has been without a marquee EDM festival since Electric Zoo infamously went under back in 2023, leaving with it a demand Summit is hoping he can fill on his own.
“I’ve always wanted to throw my own festival, and that’s why I’ve been growing the Experts Only brand for so many years,” Summit says. “Obviously we were thinking of where to do this, it could’ve been Chicago since that’s where I’m from, or maybe Miami, but there’s so many festivals there. New York is not only one of my favorite markets, it’s one of the biggest in the world, and there’s literally no electronic festival. There’s a glaring gap in the market, it’s a no-brainer for us to do New York.”
As Summit’s manager Holt Harmon adds: “As electronic music fans, the fact that there’s not a staple New York festival for electronic music at the moment is something we felt heavily, this is something that needs to occur.”
Tickets go on sale this Friday, with GA tickets starting at $119.99, VIP tickets at $299.99 and platinum tickets at $799.99. A dollar from each sale will be donated to the nonprofit Femme House, the festival said. Summit is putting on the event in partnership with promoters Medium Rare, Relentless Beats, and EMW. Experts Only expects to draw 50,000 people across two days.
Summit and his team had been loosely considering options for a festival for the past couple years, his manager Holt Harmon says, with festival planning becoming more serious after Summit’s sold-out Madison Square Garden show last year. (Summit managed to sell out the venue in less than two hours.) They’d long considered Randall’s Island given that it has a proven history as a festival venue as the previous home for Electric Zoo, and after shopping around for potential venues, they “came back on this opportunity we didn’t really think would exist,” Harmon says.
“New York is an extremely difficult place to just get the keys to,” Harmon says. “There was definitely interest from the city in having something come back in the electronic realm after E-zoo. But they want to know that not only is this something that’d happen one year, but that people are going to come back and try to make this a multi-year thing. Once we found the right partners to work with, especially guys who understood the politics and permitting of this market and venue, this really felt like the step for us to take.”
Summit is launching his event at a challenging time for festivals, as several long-running shows like Pitchfork Festival in Chicago or Desert Daze in Southern California had closed up shop in the past few years as festivals have grown increasingly costly to produce. That doesn’t shake the DJ’s confidence, with Summit talking already about goals and aspirations for years ahead, loosely opining on more markets as well.
“We want our own imprint on the scene and to be an international presence since I’m an international artist. I’m not looking at just confining this to New York, but New York is the baby right now, It’s 100 percent of the focus,” Summit says. “And so when I’m thinking of the short term, which is a few years, hopefully year one goes great. As a perfectionist, we will have notes to make it even better the following year. And hopefully it can be an annual thing.”
Summit hopes Experts Only can stand out through music curation, with Summit saying that lineups “can get stale” as they “get recycled year after year.” For Experts Only’s year one, Summit is curating a lineup based around his musical influences across dubstep, drum and bass, house and techno, tapping veterans like Kaskade and Green Velvet as well as up and comers and artists across his Experts Only Label.
“There’s some festivals out there that are really great at growing new artists, hopefully this can be one of them. Festivals are a reason why I got big. Think of the amount of careers that Ultra or Coachella broke, I’d like that for Experts Only, too.”
As it gets its start, Experts Only is obviously synonymous with John Summit, though the DJ’s longer term goal is for the show to become a broader, bespoke event less focused around him that becomes more a part of the fabric of the electronic community.
“The John Summit side of things is doing well, this is a passion project for me,” Summit says. “The goal eventually is that I won’t even have to headline it or potentially even play it. I don’t want it to be seen as just a John Summit-headlined festival wherever it goes.”