From Storm to Ultra, music festivals are growing in popularity in China

Courtesy: A2LiVE

A view of the main stage at Storm, an electronic dance music festival, in Shanghai, China.

One other well-known name in the outdoor music festival segment is Storm, a homegrown live electronic dance music festival. The festival has seen its number of attendees rise from 24,000 at its inaugural run in 2013 to 180,000 last year.

A total of 22.5 million unique views were recorded for the live video stream of Storm’s two-day Shanghai show in 2016, according to Eric Reithler-Barros, managing director of A2LiVE, the entertainment company behind Storm.

Still, the electronic music scene in China remains relatively nascent, with plenty of festival-goers at Storm indicating that it was their first experience at an outdoor concert, Reithler-Barros told CNBC.

Despite the experience being a comparatively new one for Chinese audiences, locals still made up the majority of visitors to Storm, especially at its stops in Chengdu and Guangzhou. Across its five shows in 2016, an average of 84 percent of festival-goers were from mainland China, according to A2LiVE. Around 4 percent of visitors were from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

That enthusiasm has led Storm to expand in scale since its first show five years ago. The festival is headed to 7 cities in China this year, up from 5 cities it toured in 2016. While top-tier cities — such as Beijing and Shanghai — made the list, so did second-tier ones like Chengdu and Changsha.

New stops for the festival were chosen based on factors such as streaming statistics for EDM tracks on music streaming apps in China, said Reithler-Barros. A2LiVE also had its ear to the ground, paying attention to metrics such as the number of EDM events and clubs in various cities, he added.