As ADE Turns 30 This Week, Its Managing Director Reflects on Dance Music as ‘An Emotions Industry’

This week Jan-Willem van de Ven will be traveling between worlds, all within a few-mile radius in central Amsterdam.

This Wednesday (Oct. 21), for example, says van de Ven, “by day I go from a panel to a club with 300 people having their own splendid ADE, then I go to the ADE golf tournament, then I go to with the city’s mayor to a performance by the National Ballet, and that’s all in four or five hours. It truly feels like I’m traveling around the world in five days.”

Van de Ven is managing director of ADE, or Amsterdam Dance Event, which celebrates its 30-year anniversary this week in the Dutch capital. Here, ADE Pro — the programming track for those in the industry — will host 148 panels, 25 mixers and other sessions that bring the total of Pro programs to 188. Speakers include representatives from Believe, SoundCloud, Spotify, Insomniac Events, YouTube, EMPIRE and many other labels, agencies, streamers, event brands and more.

Organizers expect 11,000 attendees for the ADE Pro and Lab elements of the event (Lab programming is designed for artists, creatives and professionals looking to get into the industry), along with an astonishing 600,000 fans for ADE’s many club sets, festivals and other consumer-facing events happening across 300 venues.

“I think ADE has transformed from a sector conference and club festival into a cultural compass that really sets the tone for what’s next,” van de Ven says of ADE’s arc over the last three decades. “It used to be panels and people meeting each other and a trade fair for electronic music. Nowadays, it’s a place where new sounds, new talent, new trends and new developments are being presented on both on a business side and an innovation level.” (He himself started at ADE in 2009 as an intern, leaving in 2016 and returning as managing director in 2019.)

ADE has indeed evolved from a trade fair into something bigger and harder to define — a moment where much of dance music industry converges, from underground promoters to major label execs to emerging artists, all in the same city at the same time. The buzz around the city is real, and the sleep is minimal. The idea is for ADE to catalyze new music, new projects, new brands and new innovations, and it has. Van de Ven recalls one such turning point in 2012 and 2013 when — amid the U.S. dance music boom — more festival brands started hosting major events at big room Amsterdam venues like the Johan Cruijff Arena. (This year, Amsterdam Music Festival, or AMF, expects roughly 40,000 fans at Johan Cruijff Arena for a lineup that includes Amelie Lens, David Guetta and Armin van Buuren.)

All in, it was a moment that marked a turning point for dance music while also expanding ADE’s own scale. But it’s not just about size and revenue. “I feel like we’re always looking into the economics of night culture, but the baseline of night culture is an emotion industry,” says van de Ven. “It’s the audience that makes night culture. The industry comes afterwards. We need to preserve night culture, make sure it can happen, and make sure we have data around the culture and subcultures.”

Presenting both some of the biggest brands in dance music while also looking at the underground are pillars of the 2026 ADE schedule. AI will be a major focus, as will an expanded social impact track that has grown well beyond its origins as ADE Green, to encompass broader questions of social sustainability in the industry. For the first time, ADE is presenting research conducted in partnership with VibeLab, the Amsterdam-based consulting and advocacy agency that creates research reports on the nightlife culture of individual cities in order to help protect their scenes. VibeLab will present a report on six global cities including New York, a document van de Ven hopes will arm the industry with data that can make the case for supporting and subsidizing nightlife to local politicians and government agencies.

This VibeLab research represents a deliberate reframing of how van de Ven thinks the industry should talk about itself. Rather than leading with economic impact figures, the standard metric used to justify nightlife’s existence to city governments and policymakers, the research attempts to measure something more elusive: what night culture actually means to the cities it inhabits, and what those cities would lose without it.

“Some things are not framed in terms of money,” van de Ven says. “The true value lies beyond economics. It’s in cultural infrastructure, in building talent, in connections. We take night culture and the first thing we ask is ‘how much is it worth?’ Cultural value should be taken seriously.”

This philosophy extends to how ADE designs its own programming. The 2026 schedule includes the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra performing Beethoven beneath a large-scale art installation by artist Boris Acket happening Wednesday (Oct. 21), the same day as Swan Lake Remixed, a performance with the Dutch National Ballet. It’s the kind of programming that has no obvious commercial logic but speaks to ADE’s belief that electronic music belongs in conversations with every other form of culture, rather than being siloed from it.

Thirty years in, van de Ven is still most energized by the version of ADE that can’t be easily categorized — the golf tournament that becomes a networking session, the club night that becomes a career-defining show, the panel discussion that sparks an idea in the audience. He hopes every ADE attendee can find their own version of the event across its many offerings.

“There’s a dancefloor for everyone,” van de Ven says.