Ultra Music Festival 2017 – Epic Stages & Djs
For the 19th year running, Ultra Music Festival 2017 continues to reign as one of the largest and most popular electronic dance music festivals in the country. Falling during the weekend of Winter Music Conference, Ultra started as a small one day party on the beach in 1999 and has since grown into a three day globally renowned festival hosted in Miami’s Bayfront Park. In 2016 it drew an attendance of over 165,000 people from around the world and featured internationally famous DJs such as Tiesto, Martin Garrex, Skrillex, Eric Prydz and many more. This year was my fourth year attending Ultra, and each year it gets better and better! Let us relive the beautiful experience together.
One of the most beautiful things about Ultra is backdrop of our gorgeous city home to such a variety of stages. Ultra has eight different stages with different genres of dance music at each one. This is an awesome way to get introduced to new music and get a taste for a different style. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to double back to a stage while heading to another because of the amazing music I heard from it! The stages are: Main Stage- the most grand and vast of stages, the production is just incredible at this stage. Each year the soaring LED stage panels change and get bigger and brighter. Most people tend to head to this stage and it usually has the big name headliner DJs! Definitely must pass through here and marvel at the lighting and sound and the sheer mass of people!
The Live Stage is one of my favorite stages found right in the middle of Bayfront Park. It lives up to its name with music performances infused with live instruments. Justice closed here at this stage and it was phenomenal. The LED panels moved and shifted around this year overhanging the musicians on the stage. There are seats throughout the area and a grassy hill behind, and this combined with the electric fusion of beats and instruments, this is a great chill out spot and comfy place to see a show after standing and walking all day.
The Carl Cox Megastructure is another fantastic stage and one where some real good vibes and dancing goes down. It is a covered structure about the size of a football field with hundreds of LED honeycomb panels that display visuals and rotate about, as well as a massive wall of animation screens apart of the DJ booth. Carl Cox himself closes out this stage and it is intense! The energy in there is incredible and he really knows how to get the crowd hyped. This stage is also a good place to head when it starts to rain!
A new stage has recently been added that surely needs some recognition and that is the Resistance stage! This stage features underground techno and house and is another one of my favorites. The stage is extremely unique, made by Arcadia productions it is a massive spider with the DJ booth as its belly. It’s made of recycled metal. The legs of the spider arch down over the dancers while it’s eyes light up and rotate about with bursts of fire shooting from its head. It is a very active and visual stage and the crowd is really mellow, with a nice breeze coming off the bay right next to the stage.
Ultra also has the Oasis Stage, Worldwide Stage, UMF Radio Stage, and the Biscayne Stage. Over the course of three days it is possible to swing by them all. Ultra has really stepped up it’s food game over the past few years, and being the foodies we are, the food definitely contributed to the experience as well. Just past the entrance is a square of so many types of foods! Grilled cheese, pad thai, pizza, arepas, smoothies, they got it all!
Overall this year was a magical one. Friendly fellow music enthusiasts everywhere, gorgeous weather with sunshine and palm tree all around with an occasional rain shower. Security was smooth and efficient and there were no deaths or sever injuries reported this year. Ultra is a wonderful representation of the fact that humans from around the world can join together as a dance community and listen to really awesome music for three days and enjoy life. Can’t wait to see you all there next year! 2018 Registration is open and early bird tickets will be released soon! Happy Festing readers!
