On April 8, Pasquale Rotella announced that EDC Las Vegas in May was a go and encouraged attendees to begin booking travel and accommodations for the event. Just twelve days later, it was announced that EDC was moving to October after all.
In the time between, and five days before the deadline to transfer 2021 tickets to 2022, Rotella wrote on Reddit that he’d be willing to host an Ask Me Anything where Insomniac attendees, called Headliners, could have their questions answered.
Rotella officially began answering questions today at 2pm PST, although the AMA thread itself has been live since Saturday, April 24 to allow people to ask questions; or, to give Insomniac time to formulate responses, depending on who you ask. By the time Rotella began answering today, there were already approximately 1,000 comments on the thread (not all of these were questions, as many questions also had replies from other Reddit users).
The top question at the time of launch came from /u/O_RRY: “How do you plan on taking responsibility for the millions of dollars your fans lost in nonrefundable flights/hotels that they lost because of YOUR guarantee?”
/u/Nighthawk759 asked, “Pasquale, why would you firmly announce the event without having official government approval?”
Rotella maintains that no single news outlet was able to accurately “piece together the timeline of what happened,” since none of the journalists were present during discussions with government officials. He says that any social distancing requirements were to be lifted at the state or county level on May 1st, which heavily if not single-handely influenced Insomniac’s decision to announce the festival on April 8. He goes on to say that enough people had even requested to transfer their tickets to 2022 that they would be able to meet the state’s 50% capacity restriction.
Permission for a second weekend was requested “just in case so we would have the option if we wanted to go that route once the State announced 50% capacity, but we were never going to force anyone out of the first and into a second weekend. […] We would’ve gone on sale for a second weekend separately.”
With regard to festivals in Southern California, Insomniac’s base of operations and most frequent booking area, Beyond Wonderland SoCal will tentatively been postponed to August 27 & 28, just three weeks after HARD Summer at NOS Events Center in San Bernardino. A second backup date of November 26 & 27 is also on the book in case another postponement is deemed necessary.
“Although California announced full reopening on June 15, due to the lack of clarity around what ‘full reopening’ may actually mean, I’ve decided it’s safest to postpone Beyond Wonderland SoCal to our first backup date of August 27 & 28, 2021,” he wrote. “In the event the August date needs to be postponed, we have a second backup date of November 26 & 27, 2021.”
There are still plenty of questions left to be answered, and we will continue to update this article as more responses come in.
