As EDC Orlando attendees return to reality, there has been perhaps an outsized focus on crowd flow concerns at EDC Orlando 2025. As the festival wrapped and many attendees shared their amazing experiences on social media, some attendees took to social media to complain about the crowds, feeling that the issues from 2024 had not been improved enough. Insomniac and its entire team take all comments very seriously, with Insomniac CEO Pasquale Rotella sharing a statement on social media on Monday evening to address the concerns about crowd flow and water stations.
To show just how receptive Insomniac is to attendee feedback, the company gave us time with its Executive Producer for EDC, Matthew Smit. We talked about the layout changes, crowd flow management, and water stations. The overall message is that Insomniac hears you and EDC is always working on ways to provide a better experience for everybody.
Congestion Not “Crowd Crush”
The term “crowd crush,” which has been used in some social media comments, creates a false impression of what happened. A “crowd crush” is what happened at the infamous Astroworld, where a stampede occurs and leads to death or serious bodily injury due to asphyxiation or trampling. Nothing like this happened at EDC Orlando. In fact, there were no medical calls related to the crowd congestion that occurred Sunday.
Crowd congestion, on the other hand, is when you have a high density of people in a confined area leading to restricted movement. This happens in festivals when the flow of people temporarily exceeds the capacity of a certain area of the overall venue. This often leads to feelings of anxiety or panic. Urgent crowd control measures can be put in place to deal with this. EDC did deploy its Ground Control team to help direct the crowd flow so that the various directions of flow were directed in different areas. EDC Orlando did manage the crowds to avoid any type of crowd crush, but crowd congestion takes finer tuning and is always an evolving process.
Venue Changes & Future Plans
EDC did, in fact, make a lot of changes from 2024 to 2025 to help alleviate crowd congestion. At all stages the areas were opened up more to allow more capacity, whether it was by moving food and beverage areas further away or by removing brand activation stages in the area. The most “controversial” change was moving the water stations. The festival previously had a water station in that major crowd congestion area near VIP at Circuit Grounds, which amplified the congestion in 2024. Moving this did alleviate that particular congestion, and it allowed people to spread more evenly throughout the venue. In the past, EDC found that even with multiple stations, people tended to use just one and left the others mostly empty. In the area between Circuit Grounds and SteroBloom, some container walls used to enclose certain spaces were removed. Certain pathways were moved around the venue as well. Also, as many things as possible were moved within the stadium to free up more space outside for people to move.
From my own experience, I noticed less congestion in the perimeter around the stadium, although the situation was the worst on Sunday due to the rain.
Schedule Changes
Artist bookings were scheduled to better control crowd flow.
Capacity
While people throw around the term “overselling” a lot, the festival had the sold the same number of tickets as last year. There are 100,000 attendees per day, and the busiest day in terms of attendance was Saturday. Sunday notably had the lowest attendance of the three days, which is pretty commonplace.
Rain
The congestion issue was primarily noticeable on Sunday, and yet that was the day with the lowest attendance. The reason both things are true is because of the rain and the temporary shutdown of the stages. Early in the day the stages were shut down, meaning everybody had to quickly move to a shelter location until the lightning passed. This caused a lot of muddy areas to develop, where people would no longer walk or stand once the “all clear” was given. Essentially, this situation cut off numerous pathways and forced everybody to follow whatever dry pathways could be found.
EDC is paying particular attention to this issue and how to mitigate it in the future.
Constantly Evolving
To close out the conversation, Insomniac stressed that EDC Orlando is a constant process of evolution and growth. On top of that, it’s important to remember that out of the 300,000 people that attended over the weekend, the vast majority had an amazing time, myself included. It’s not unusual for certain people to have a bad experience, and Insomniac hears them, but this negative impression being spread on forums is not reflective of reality. The festival is always making changes based on feedback and experiences to make things better. Insomniac says nothing is off the table in terms of potential ways to improve crowd flow issues in the future, and explained a number of potential “outside the box” ideas they are considering to improve the situation and expand the available space in the coming years. The bottom line is that the situation will keep getting better and the festival will continue to be an amazing experience
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