There are a few official electronic music museums in the world, but one of the most expansive collections of dance culture paraphernalia must be in Pasquale Rotella’s office.

The sprawling space within the chic Insomniac Events office in Calabasas, Calif. is a trove of art books and vinyl, stacks of rave flyers, clothing, a whole area that appears to be just toys. “Look at this,” Rotella tells me, excitedly holding out a Techno Viking action figure still in its packaging. He’s got framed pages of ’90s scene bible URB Magazine. A collection of posters leaning against the wall ready to hang include a vintage ad for rave wear brand Clobber. There’s a shelf of gifts fans have given him over the years. He shows me a vinyl record on which a woman affixed a long letter, written in childlike bubble handwriting, about how Insomniac shows changed her life. She adorned this vinyl with dozens of flower petals made of construction paper and glitter, and when one fell off recently, Rotella glued it back on himself.

In total, the space gives equal parts Willy Wonka and Walt Disney if they were into techno. Both are figures Rotella has long said he relates to and in ways aspires to be. Arguably the greatest manifestation of this vision is happening days from now, when the 30th edition of Insomniac’s flagship event, EDC Las Vegas, returns to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Last year Insomniac reported that EDC 2026 sold out 24 hours after going on sale, and this weekend the fest will welcome (according to the company), roughly 200,000 people a day, putting it firmly among the world’s largest music festivals.

EDC Las Vegas, which moved to the city from Los Angeles in 2012, is arguably the crown jewel in a sprawling portfolio of global Insomniac events that includes a suite of international EDCs, myriad editions of its longstanding festivals like Nocturnal Wonderland and Beyond Wonderland, a flurry of national clubs Insomniac has investments in and partnerships with fests like Miami’s III Points and Germany’s Time Warp, the esteemed techno festival Insomniac partnered with in 2023 to host global editions, including Time Warp’s flagship event in Mannheim. The company also encompasses a record label, clothing line and other entities.

It’s a long way from the illegal raves Rotella started throwing in his native SoCal in the early ’90s, but as he tells it, he’s always seeking the connective tissue between that world and what he does now. Here, Rotella discusses his life’s work.

In the context of genres like pop or hip-hip, dance music often feels much less visible. Simultaneously, EDC 2026 will bring in 200,000 people a day. Do you think dance music still exists outside the mainstream, and if so, why?

The rave scene never had any mentorship by the music industry. America was rock and roll, hip-hop and country, for the most part. I couldn’t even hire people from the music industry, even if I’d had the money, because it wasn’t looked at as real music. The music industry that did touring, that did the major labels, they didn’t take us seriously. It was not something that was natural for Americans to take in.

It took us decades to get accepted on the level we’re even accepted now, which is, as you’re saying, still kind of underground. I mean, it’s amazing. I don’t really know the reason. I think even the artists themselves are striving to be accepted as rock and roll guys. That’s why they might even take a pay cut to play a multi-genre festival. It’s hard for me to answer, really, because I’m so satisfied with dance music culture. I have been since I walked into my first event. I wanted to get accepted by the music industry and by society so we could move dance event culture forward and get legal venues and do all that. And part of you wanted people’s approval, like, it’s so good that you want to share it and you want people to understand it. But as you described it, there’s this feeling like it’s not quite there yet, or it’s not quite enough.

And at the same time, so much of it is thriving in the spaces where it does exist.

It almost feels removed. Like when a celebrity comes to EDC, no one’s really talking about it, or it’s very muted, whereas if someone shows up to Coachella, it’s a bigger deal.

Going into this 30th anniversary of EDC, are you feeling different from other years in any way? Are you nervous about anything in particular?

I’m always a little nervous, but I’m also thinking about this existing forever beyond even my years, and I want to get that right. I really believe in what we do, and I get a lot of gratification out of the happiness it brings people and how it connects people. I just got interviewed by a journalist and on the call, she’s like, “Hey, I want you to know I just got engaged, and I met my fiancé at EDC Orlando.” I love that. And I want this to continue, because promoters are a dying breed. I think about reimagining what we’re doing here so we can have structure and the ability for this to continue. Just like DJs have kind of faded away, the art of DJing, so have promoters.

Say more about that.

The art of promoting in the rave scene, what I define as promoting, is very different than the concert industry’s definition of a promoter. In my school, promoters were visionaries and artists, and they would curate events for communities and culture and the art and music of it all, not necessarily for the artist or like a concert.

[He walks to his coffee table and grabs an ornate rave flyer featuring the Trix cereal rabbit mascot.]

Like, look at this! A promoter made this. It’s the Trix Rabbit! Every aspect of the show can have art infused into it, whether it’s advertising, marketing, flyers, how you roll it out, the voice of the festival, the production, the experience, the lineup curation. That way of doing events is harder and harder, because it’s turned into kind of a curated lineup of hard ticket acts. Like, “Who’s gonna sell my tickets? What are the analytics on this artist?”

That’s very different than someone who’s throwing a party and the community’s trusting them that the music is going to be amazing because you found the best DJs, not the biggest brands to showcase. Some of these artists are brands themselves, and it’s gotten to the point where sometimes I feel like I don’t even want to book them, because they’re too big. They’ve graduated. They should just go play an arena.

And some of them do.

Well, they do it in addition to. And it creates logistical challenges at festivals where people go, “They over sold,” but we didn’t oversell. At old raves, none of the artists were hard ticket artists. I couldn’t take Doc Martin, or DJ Dan, or Ron D Core and put them in a venue, go on sale and sell tickets. What I could do was put them at a festival with five or seven stages and people would roam. One place wouldn’t get overly crowded, because it was an adventure and a musical journey. You’d curate the best music, but it wasn’t a frantic rush to go see this or that.

Are you saying that the event itself ideally supersedes the artists playing it? Is EDC or Beyond Wonderland the headlining draw?

No. It’s all as important as each other. The difference is that every aspect is important. This invite is important, and we will work as hard on that as we will the lineup… That’s what I mean by the art of being a promoter from the rave scene being a dying breed. It’s harder to be that kind of promoter. 

You could argue that you’re kind of at the tip of the pyramid of dance promoters. What do you think the difference maker has been in allowing you to sustain, succeed and continue growing?

The beatings we all received, they never took me out. I survived. Every promoter from this culture had tough times, not just me. It was extremely difficult for all of them. Part of me wants to, for a second, say “Did I love it more than them?” But I don’t think I loved it more. I know how much people loved it. I was able to keep moving forward, and I think if you go way back, most just didn’t have the ability to keep going.

What is it within you that gave you that ability?

It’s hard for me to answer that about myself. I don’t really know, because I know there have been thousands of people that love the culture and the scene as much as I did that couldn’t keep going. There’s someone who works here in this office that I respect a lot, that when this has been talked about, they said, “There’s just a lot wrong with you.” It could be that. Most people don’t keep throwing events when they’re under indictment. [Editor’s Note: In 2012, Rotella was indicted on six felony counts and accused of bribing an event manager of the LA Coliseum with roughly $2 million in kickbacks while he and other promoters hosted events there. He was cleared of all federal charges in 2016.] 

What I do know is that I’m extremely grateful to still be here doing what I love. I pinch myself all the time, because I look around and the amount of people that come and go, even people that started 10 years ago come and go, let alone starting in ’92… It’s really a dream.

Have you ever flirted with the idea of, “Maybe I don’t want to do this anymore?”

No, because I think about this in the morning and when I go to bed at night. My passion allows me to be able to work on it 24/7 without feeling like I need a break.

When you go to sleep at night, what are you thinking about?

How to make it better and how to keep it exciting for even myself. It’s not really a decision I make, it’s more a pull, because I am a super fan of it all, and I am constantly being pulled in a direction that takes me to these places that I’m happy as a raver at the show.

I want to say this sensitively, because I know the people who work at Insomniac are deeply into dance music. Then I also see criticisms of the company that say it’s behind a lot of consolidation in the scene and that it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the underground anymore, because of how big it is, because it gets funding from Live Nation. The criticism is that that underground thing is kind of a front, or not totally sincere. What do you make of those criticisms?

It’s just gotten so big, and so many new people have come in. That’s contributed to it. The way people are online has contributed to it. I think it’s hard to understand like, “How could real ravers be at this company that’s doing these big things? How could they not only be about the money? Look how big these events are. Look how much tickets are.”

I still feel we’re doing underground parties… I think when you go to an EDC, you’re going to have people who are there because they want to see certain artists. You’re going to have the underground heads there too, and on that certain dance floor or in some little secret nook stage area, you will find the underground. You will. This is where we come from, and why we do this.

I’m not saying it’s not a massive festival or a commercially known event. I’m saying that we come from the underground, and the underground is weaved throughout this big happening. There will be people that disagree, and that’s okay. But honestly, if that magic wasn’t there and those moments didn’t happen and it was soulless, I wouldn’t be doing this anymore. I don’t need to do this anymore. I do it because I love it and because I feel it.

Not to belabor the point, but I want to understand this. Another criticism is this consolidation aspect, where Insomniac has all these big festivals and also has investments in other festivals and clubs across the country.

There’s so much misinformation out there… But what you’re touching on about consolidation — so we talked about the death of the scene, and we’ve talked about promoters not surviving and how hard it’s been for me and others. I used to be a scrappy promoter like a lot of other scrappy promoters… I looked around about five years ago, and it saddened me to see so many people gone who I know, that can’t enjoy this with me. There are new promoters I’ve met, new meaning [they came up] five or 10 years ago, that also disappeared.

I’ve always taken any phone call. Anyone someone perceived as a competitor, I’ve never been that way with them, unless they were after me or had a problem with me. You have to defend yourself. I don’t want to get my hands tied and let them punch me. I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to fight battles, but I never swung first. Ever. The reason why in this office you have Nick [Luckinbill] from Narnia and Meelo [Solis] from Audiotistic and Jeff Ryan from 420 and on and on is because I’ve always been friendly. I’ve always helped. If a promoter lost a venue and had tickets sold and didn’t know where to go, I would offer a venue, because I cared about the scene. People would never know that if you read the Internet.

So when looking at the history of rave, at what we’ve gone through as a community and the fact that I’m a survivor and there haven’t really been survivors of the culture and community, I had a realization that I wanted to be a company that if I, Pasquale Rotella, met when I was trying to get through these struggles, and I was in debt and working a year to do an event to only be in debt after it happened — that I could be there for people who love this and could identify who those lovers are and get behind them. And there is no consolidation, actually, in the way that the public views it, or some of the public, because there’s people who know what’s up. The people that are really loud are mostly misinformed.

Do you want to say more about that?

The people I get behind are lifers. This is very important. Because the reason no one wants to cover this stuff and why there’s no time for it and why people will continue being misinformed is that I’m so nerdy and detailed that it’s too hard and it’s too boring. But it is the truth. The only people I do deals with are — it’s nobody that wants the payday. It’s ravers, and they’re a dying breed. It’s people who want to do it for the rest of their life and figure out how. We can be a solution for them.

And these people we partner with, we don’t tell them what to do. We give them advice; we finance their shows; we give them a platform and we give them the resources to build their dream. So when someone says Insomniac is involved, and all of a sudden someone who you’re talking about goes, “Oh, now it’s going to go to crap.” The only person driving that project is the founder. No one else.

I’m thinking about what tremendous power that gives you to lift certain people up.

I hope to be a blessing for them. That is the goal, and there is no other agenda. A lot of them have been headaches, to be quite honest, because not everyone is honest. There’s a situation where I thought I got behind great people, and they were not great people. They were not honest people. That personally is hurtful, because we treat everyone like family, and if they’re stealing or something like that, and then the perception is that we’re the bad guys and they’re the good guys, it’s tough.

But there’s wonderful partnerships we have, like Time Warp. They’re real ravers. Those promoters are artists. That’s another problem — there’s no one out there that looks at promoters as artists. I do, because I know that I’m an artist, and I recognize them as artists, and I want to invest in them.

To bring it back to EDC, how important is the success of this flagship in lifting everything up and creating the funding to do what you’re talking about? Is EDC the linchpin in terms of Insomniac’s financial success?

I don’t take money off the table at Insomniac. The culmination of everything we do all year goes back into investing in Insomniac and its partners. So all of it’s important. For us to take risks with these amazing visionaries, we have to take huge risks, and we do. All these events feed into one another, and EDC is one of our best known. It’s kind of a culmination of what we do all year, even beyond the [other] EDCs. It’s a bit of Factory Town, of Bass Rush, of all of it. So it’s really important that we have success.

You mentioned the international events — there’s EDC Korea, Colombia and Thailand, among others. Are there new markets you’re looking into, and where in the world is best for you right now?

The best places in the world for us are the places we have good partners and where we have a venue that works for the vision of what we want to do there. And also, is there a place for us there in the culture and community? For example, we wouldn’t go to Belgium, because our friends at Tomorrowland have it covered, and it’s amazing. But where are we maybe needed? I felt like we were needed in Colombia. That’s where we gravitate to, where we think we can bring something different.

You’ve been doing this for decades, and it sounds like you want to do it in perpetuity. What’s the vision?

I really do feel that I’m just getting started. I feel a big energy right now. I feel like in the United States, dance music is barely just getting accepted by normies. [Dance music] is on a different level right now, and I think we can recruit people to get weird with us. And there are so many ideas. I’m also behind other visionaries who’ve been in this for a long time, like the Time Warp guys, and they also have big dreams that are different than where they’ve come from and what they’ve done. So it’s a really exciting time, and I’m reflecting and simultaneously thinking about the future. And I can’t not mention the DJs we’ve lost recently.

Right. DJs who’ve been crucial to the development of the West Coast and SoCal scenes in particular, like DJ Dan, DJ Taylor, DJ Reza, died over the last year. What does it mean to you to lose people who were there with you at the beginning?

We wouldn’t be here without them. There are thousands of DJs and promoters who’ve loved this culture. Some of them aren’t around to witness where we are, and a lot of them aren’t involved anymore. Shout out to them and love to them. Any of those people can always hit me up and I will take care of them, because they’re not forgotten. They’re part of this. This 30-year anniversary is their event too.