Is Outside Lands becoming Portola?: a quantitative analysis

Outside Lands (OSL) just dropped their linup for their 2026 show, and one curious thing seems a bit present when looking at all the artists. I'll give you a second to tell me what's interesting below:

Ok, it's a bit hard, but most of the people listed are electronic artists. Now, there's nothing wrong with electronic; I like electronic music; the bay loves electronic music, they made a whole specialized music festival that's like a month after Outside Lands that just does mostly electronic music (Portola).

My question though is when did Outside Lands end up being Portola light? I decided to do some quantitative analysis to see if we're going to see OSL 2028 have the exact same artists at Portola 2028.

Getting the Data

The first thing we need is to grab some data; we already have who's playing at event, but we need to know what genre of music each artist does, which TBH could be very painstaking work, seeing how there's like 100 artists a year. Fortunatly, Outside Lands has a very passionate reddit community, and one guy /u/undeadsinatra has been making genre+artist lists every year, so I had to thank them for making it easy for me to do this!!

undeadsinatra had been posting for a long time, but let's just focus from 2021-2026. I think to get a real trend, we could go further, but I think even this 5 year window we can get some good numbers. The early 2020's could be seen as the tail end of the hip-hop era of the last twoish decades, so I think we could probably see a rapid change here.

One thing to note is the data is a bit specific, undeadsinatra went very hard into giving very specific genres for each artist. I think for our analysis we only needed to worry about super-genres: Rock, Hip Hop and R&B, Electronic, Folk, Jazz and Country. So what do we do now? It's around 610 artists we'd need to classify; fortunately, we live in a post LLM world, so I just threw these unstructured lists data into Letta Code and told it to make me a spreadsheet with all the artists and genres.

I also added a column called is_soma_tent, because Outside Lands does have a EDM specific dancefloor, but I did not want to count that in our final totals since those DJs operate in their own little cultural bubble.

The Analysis

So what do we get when we visualize this data? We do start seeing a tend, in 2021 we see electronic only making up 17% of total artists at Outside Lands slowly growing until 2023, where they made up almost 40% of artists. 2025 and 2026, slightly less, 35% and 37% respective, but given that we have 5 other genres, it's definitely overrepresented.

Jazz and country have always been lacking at OSL, but if we compare it to their big contemporaries of Hip Hop, R&B and Rock, and Pop, we can see a trend that Hip-Hop is on the way out, Rock and Pop are somewhere always in the middle, and Electronic is dominating.

I think Outside Lands is being strategic in following the zeitgeist here. Portola started because there was a enough of lack of electronic music at OSL to create a market for a completely seperate music festival, now that OSL is chasing electronic fans, it may require Portola to adapt to the headwinds. Music festivals are expensive, especially Portola and OSL, college students and young adults make up the majority of the clientel of these events and they're famously broke.

One thing to note is that many of the big electronic artists at OSL, especially this year already played at Portola. Does this dilute the brand? Does it make them seem like they're followers, or do people even care, they get to see their fav artists every year in a new venue (most likely)

I'll have to see what Portola does to challenge OSL, will they stick to their guns and be the premier electronic music festival, or will they try to bite back and add more non-electronic artists to their roster.

Is Folk the next big thing?

If we look at the trendlines, one other genre is slowly trickling up, and that's Folk. I don't really know why that is, or if that means anything. Will Folk replace electronic? Not sure, but if you told me in 2010 hip hop would be replaced by electronic I'd tell you that "It's over, nobody listens to techno"

Thank you again /u/undeadsinatra for the data! Feel free to use my cleaned up spreadsheet for your own analysis.