ADE 2026: what a day actually looks like

Amsterdam Dance Event turns 30 this year and runs from 21 to 25 October: more than 1,200 events across 300-plus venues, with more than 3,300 artists expected. Last year, 600,000 people came. Which is useful information until you are actually trying to plan five days of it.

ADE is not one festival site with a gate, a timetable and a final act. At nine in the morning you can be inside an aquarium listening to whales through a spatial sound system. At two you can be at a day party in a museum. At eight you can be watching Jean-Michel Jarre, the French electronic music pioneer behind Oxygène, in a 6,000-capacity concert hall. And at three the next morning you can be in a club somewhere else entirely.

So rather than another list of who is playing, here is roughly what an ADE day actually looks like.

Morning, from nine

The first official ADE activity starts before most clubs have properly gone to bed.

If you have an ADE Pro Pass, start by picking it up. The info and ticket desks at Felix Meritis and at Stromma Pier 6 by Centraal open at nine, except on Saturday, when Felix Meritis opens at ten. Bring ID: passes are personal, and nobody else can collect yours.

You do not need one to get a lot out of ADE, though. The Pro Pass is built around the conference, and most of ADE's visitors never have one. They buy tickets for the nights they want and fill the days with things that are free. More on that further down.

Then there is the aquarium. Deep Seeing Currents, an Olafur Eliasson installation inside the ARTIS Aquarium with sound brought to life by 4DSOUND, opens at 09:00 and runs until 18:00 from Wednesday to Sunday. You need an ARTIS ticket to get in.

The conference gets going later in the morning. ADE Pro runs Wednesday to Saturday, mostly from Felix Meritis, with other parts of the programme spread across the city.

And this is probably the first thing worth knowing about ADE: by lunchtime, several completely different versions of it are already happening at once.

Midday to six

This is when the conference is in full swing and the day parties start multiplying.

There are label showcases, record-store sessions, talks, exhibitions, networking events and parties already running around noon. The official programme has club events starting as early as 12:00; by late afternoon there are enough overlapping options that pretending you are going to "see ADE" becomes fairly meaningless.

If you know Dutch festivals, this part will feel familiar. In summer most of them run in daylight and wrap up around eleven, and plenty of Dutch crowds treat ADE the same way: start in the afternoon, and be home before the night shift begins. Or treat the night shift as the day's afterparty.

A few that still had tickets, or need none, on 5 October. On the Wednesday, Monkey Project takes over the Westerkerk from 17:00 with a hybrid DJ set from WhoMadeWho, free. On Thursday, Eric Prydz plays the Gashouder from 18:00 to 22:00, from €59.95. On Friday, NRG fills the Nxt Museum with hard techno from 14:00 to 22:00, from €38.

Free is also a real option during the day. ADE Friends runs across the week and includes in-store sessions, radio, record-shop events, brunches, drinks and other smaller events. ADE describes most of them as free, rather than all of them, so check before turning up.

This is also the bit of ADE that is easiest to miss if you treat the week as five club nights.

Six to eleven

Wednesday makes the range particularly obvious.

Swan Lake Remixed for ADE brings Dutch National Ballet and ISH Dance Collective to the Gashouder for opening night. The main performance starts at 19:45, with a second 17:45 performance added to the programme.

Across town, Jean-Michel Jarre plays AFAS Live from 20:00 to 23:00 as part of ADE's 30th anniversary. 2026 also marks fifty years since Oxygène, which is the reason the pairing makes rather more sense than "famous electronic musician plays electronic music festival".

In theory, the 17:45 ballet gives you enough time to do both. In practice both ballet performances and the Jarre show are sold out, so it is resale or nothing.

Still, that mix is a big part of what makes ADE worth the trip. A ballet with a DJ in it is not a side programme here. For its 30th edition ADE has even made it a theme: its anniversary Icon Series has a whole strand, Connecting Art Forms, for events where electronic music meets dance, visual art and installations.

Later in the week, the evenings spread further outside the normal club circuit. On Sunday evening, for example, the ARTIS Planetarium hosts Signals: Hearing a Changing Planet, turning satellite data about the Earth into sound and visuals, made with support from the European Space Agency. Doors are at 19:30 and it starts at 20:00.

ADE at this point could mean a ballet, a planetarium, an arena show or somebody starting a six-hour set in a basement.

And then night

This is when the programme becomes enormous.

Unlike the impression you can get from looking at ADE as one giant festival, there is no single opening time, closing time or curfew. Events are run across hundreds of independent venues and by different promoters.

The ADE programme does list start and finish times for many of them. On Wednesday alone, the listings begin with free sessions from 17:00 and run through to Awakenings' opening night at the Sugarfactory, from 23:00 to 07:00.

So the problem is not that the times do not exist. It is that there are hundreds of them.

Age limits vary too. The promoter and venue set the rules for individual nights, so check the event you are actually buying rather than assuming ADE has one policy for the whole week.

The ticket thing

There is no standalone ADE festival pass. That is probably the most useful sentence in this piece.

Club and festival tickets are sold separately by the individual organisers. ADE links out to them from its event pages, so the programme is the easiest place to start.

What ADE itself sells is the ADE Pro Pass, €725 on ADE's ticket page. On 5 October the site said there was a week left at that price, so check before you assume it still is.

It is made for people who work in music: DJs and producers, label owners, managers, promoters. They come less for the talks than for the people they can get in a room with. With the pass you get:

• →Four days of conference: keynotes, masterclasses and the "Meet the..." sessions, where you sit at a table with labels or managers.
• →Matchmaking: arranged meetings about releases, bookings and collaborations.
• →Year-round access to ADE's database of more than 11,000 music professionals, with its own messaging.
• →Entry to official ADE Festival and Arts & Culture events across the week, as long as there is room.
• →A free five-day public transport pass.

You collect it at one of the info and ticket desks. Felix Meritis is open until 20:00 and Stromma Pier 6 by Centraal until 22:00. Both are closed on Sunday, and both already open on Tuesday, the day before ADE starts, if you want to have it sorted early.

But there is an important catch. A Pro Pass does not guarantee that you will get into every festival event. Venues reserve limited capacity for pass holders; once that is full, ADE switches to what it calls a "full-for-now" policy and the organiser decides when more people can enter.

ADE's own advice is simple: if there is one particular night you absolutely want to attend, buy the ticket for that event.

Also worth knowing: the Pro Pass does not get you into ADE Lab On Track, which is application-based.

And plenty of ADE needs no ticket at all. Besides ADE Friends, the programme lists free events every day, and on the Wednesday the first ones start at 17:00.

Sold out does not always mean gone. TicketSwap has been ADE's official marketplace partner since 2023, and in the Netherlands it caps resale at 120 percent of the original price. That cap is TicketSwap's own rule.

From our experience last minute is often more doable than it looks. Plenty of people buy tickets for more than one night to be safe, and sell the ones they do not use once they know where they want to be.

The anniversary bits

Thirty years gives ADE a reason to look backwards as well as book another few thousand artists.

On Thursday, 30 Years of ADE puts Anna Knaup, Maria Jiménez, Richard Zijlma and Gary Smith in the Shaffyzaal at Felix Meritis, from 16:15 to 17:15, moderated by Dave Clarke.

The numbers give some idea of what happened in between: ADE says it grew from 300 professional delegates to 10,000, and from three nighttime venues to 300.

Dave Clarke is back for Artists on AI, A No-BS Roundtable, with Mathame, BT and Portrait XO.

And yes, there is also an event called Dave Clarke Presents: 30 Years of ADE. Different thing. Worth checking before you end up at the Melkweg on Friday night expecting a panel discussion.

Three DJs we recommend, having photographed them

Adriatique, PAWSA and Josh Baker. Coda's photographers shot all three at Brunch Electronik in Berlin on 26 and 27 July 2025, and the full albums from those two days are linked below. Adriatique we had already shot a few months earlier, in April 2025, at Terra Solis, Tomorrowland's desert venue in Dubai. At ADE, Adriatique play all night long at Awakenings on the Saturday, from 23:00 to 07:00 at the Sugarfactory in Halfweg, just outside the city. PAWSA is at SONA's GOLFOS day party on the Sunday in Zaandam. Josh Baker closes the Gashouder on the Sunday, but that one is sold out, so it is TicketSwap only.

ADE at 30, then, is not five nights with a few things happening during the day. It starts at nine in the morning, spreads across more than 300 venues, and does not really stop until Sunday night.

The difficult part is no longer finding something to go to. It is deciding which version of ADE you want.