ultra music festival
Ultra Music Festival (UMF) is an annual outdoor electronic music festival that takes place during March in Miami, Florida, United States. The festival was founded in 1999 by Russell Faibisch and Alex Omes and is named after the Ultra Music label.[citation needed]
It was first held on Miami Beach, but besides a tenure at Bicentennial Park, and briefly being held at Virginia Key in 2019, it has primarily been held at Bayfront Park in downtown Miami. It was a two-day festival from 1998 to 2006.
Since 2011, Ultra has taken place across three days (Friday through Sunday) during the month of March. In 2012, it had a record attendance, of 155,000 people. In 2013, the festival took place across two consecutive weekends to celebrate its 15th anniversary, with a combined attendance of 330,000 people. In 2014, the festival returned to its original single-weekend format, selling out pre-sale tickets in under five minutes. The city of Miami has estimated that since 2012, Ultra has "generated approximately $995 million of economic impact", with $168 million in 2018 alone. The festival had been suspended since 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic but resumed in 2022.
The festival is held alongside the Winter Music Conference—an event focusing on the electronic music industry (which was acquired by Ultra outright in 2018), and Miami Music Week—a larger program of electronic music concerts and parties held across the region, with both events usually leading into Ultra.
Although they share names, Ultra Music Festival was not directly tied to Ultra Records, an electronic music record label. However, the two entities did announce a "global alliance" in August 2012, which would allow them to collaborate on marketing and cross-promotion.
Alongside the flagship event in Miami, Ultra has spawned a larger series of international franchises under the blanket branding Ultra Worldwide, which have included locations such as Croatia, South Africa, South Korea, Singapore, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and others.
