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.” Related Josh Baker and Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll Among New ADE Pro Speakers for 30th Anniversary Conference Diddy Moved From New Jersey Prison to Similar Facility in Pennsylvania Weezer to Receive Legend of Live Award at 2026 Billboard Live Music Summit 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.