How Creamfields Started the Global Dance Festival Movement

This weekend, starting at 10 a.m PT/ 1 p.m. ET Friday, Yahoo Live will live stream selected acts from all three days of the Creamfields festival in the U.K., featuring sets from many of the top EDM acts in the world, including Fatboy Slim, Steve Aoki, Martin Garrix, and many more. Tune in HERE to watch!

Creamfields is one of those festivals that DJs from around the world follow and dream of playing. Just ask American DJ Aoki. "Creamfields is one of the most important traditional English festivals," he says. "It's kind of like a rite of passage to break into the country. And Cream, the organization, the promoter, is so embedded in electronic music in England. I'd say it's the most powerful and influential, definitely the one with the most tradition and culture."

For obvious reasons, across Europe the festival is as important to DJs there as Coachella and the Electric Daisy Carnival are to American artists. Germany's Robin Schulz says, "It's a great honor to play there. Creamfields is a true legend. It's great to see my name on the lineup."

That sentiment is shared by Dutch DJ Ferry Corsten: "I had always heard about U.K. festivals when I started playing as a DJ, and couldn't believe I had a chance to play there. It remains over the years as one of the festivals to play in in the U.K. and now around the world."

The global expansion of Creamfields greatly impressed Gary Richards, who runs HARD events and also will be making his Creamfields debut as a performer this weekend as Destructo. "I've always followed Creamfields, I followed the brand and what they've done, how they went globally," he says. "It was one of the massive ones on the global scale that did electronic. I think they were one of the first ones, booking Daft Punk, the Chems, Basement Jaxx, all that stuff. James [Barton] was one of the first ones to expand it into like Argentina, Brazil, different parts of the globe, and really develop a global identity for a festival and brand with the compilations and everything, the whole global vision."

Barton, who co-founded the festival and now runs the Electronic Music Division at Live Nation, admits he had no idea the event would grow as large as it has when he and his partners began it in 1998 as a way to celebrate the music they loved. "We had one intention and one intention only, which was to create a music festival dedicated to dance," he says. "We didn't know whether year one would be successful, let alone two, three, four, five. So no it never entered our minds or wildest dreams that we would be organizing this festival for 16, 17 years, that we would be creating a blueprint for dance music festivals all around the world at that time, which is obviously what we went on to do. So no, not in our wildest dreams we never envisioned we'd be doing it as long and so many places as we did."

Britain's Paul Oakenfold, one of the most successful DJs in dance music's history, recalls those early days of Creamfields. Looking back on his earliest memory of the festival, he says, "[It was] a small independent festival with a fantastic crowd. Was a real joy to play."  

Though Oakenfold remembers the early days of Creamfields as a "small independent festival," Barton recalls the festival was a success from the first year in 1998. "That first show something like 32,000 people arrived, we made money from the first show, [and] of course you feel as though you created something unique and very special," he says. "And I think once you see the success, you see the post-event reaction, the reviews and just the general love and goodwill to what you've created at that point you're like, 'OK, we have something really special and unique, something that we can look to grow.'"

They quickly recognized the growth potential and took the festival to Argentina, continually expanding over the last decade, into other parts of South America like Brazil and Chile, as well as throughout Europe, into Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and more. One of Oakenfold's favorite Creamfields memories was helping welcome the festival into Buenos Aires.

"I would have to say my favorite memory is when I played the first Creamfields in Buenos Aires after introducing James Barton and Martin Gontad," he says.

But while there's a thrill in seeing great artist in their hometowns, Creamfields U.K. is the flagship of the franchise, the home base. The acts we spoke to all concur the fans there make the U.K. edition special.

"There are a lot of great festivals out there, but I like the U.K. crowd a lot," Schulz says, "Very passionate and very euphoric."

Oakenfold concurs. "I think they stand out because of the crowds. It's really all about that," he says.

"The whole weekend experience of kids coming out to party, camp, and have an amazing time over there gives it such a relaxed vibe," Corsten adds.

Aoki is a relative newcomer to the Creamfields world, having made his debut after 2010. But he's been blown away by the welcome he's received from the fans and the community. "This year I'm playing twice, I'm playing with 3 Are Legend, my group with Dimitri From Vegas and Like Mike, and also I'm doing my own set. Last year I did the same thing and the 3 Are Legend set closed the main stage on the first day and it was insane. It was one of the loudest shows I've ever played to, where it's so loud you can't even hear the music," he says. "The entire time they're singing along with all the songs we're playing. With the Steve Aoki set the next day, I played in the daytime amazing crowd. I always want to look at in a humble way, but I'm just so happy to be playing again this year, playing those sets, really strong memories for me from last year."

This will be his fourth consecutive year as part of Creamfields worldwide, and when asked how he's seen it grow and change, Aoki has a simple answer. "It just gets better and better every year."

All of this is incredibly validating for Barton, who thinks back to the beginning of his experiment to take dance from raves to a legitimate festival a la Glastonbury or Reading. "We didn't want to create a rave, we wanted to create a real festival," he says. "We had the same people that organized those other festivals in the U.K. working on our festival. We had all the same production companies, we used all the same security, so there was nothing about our show that felt anything like the illegal raves that took place prior to that. We came at this as, 'This is a genre of a music which we really believe in, which we really love and we want people to take it seriously.'"