Brands Are Throwing More Raves Than Ever

Launch parties used to mean an open bar and a few words from a VP. This year, HBO, Spotify and LinkedIn traded that format for dark rooms, DJs and guest lists pulled from streaming data. The Wall Street Journal looked at the trend on October 5 and asked what marketers get back from a rave. For the people who actually go to them, the better question is which brands have earned the right to be there, and dance music already has a long list of them to compare against.

Office raves, arcade raves and a McDonald’s dance floor

HBO’s version landed on January 29, when it teamed up with Boiler Room to promote season four of Industry, its drama about young London finance workers. After an invite-only screening of episode four, fans who had applied for free invites got into a Brooklyn warehouse party with The Dare, Chicken, Kassie Krut and Justin Strauss on the decks and cast members on the floor. HBO’s marketing team told the Journal it treats these nights as content machines: the crowd in the room is one audience, and everyone who sees the footage in their feeds is the bigger one.

Spotify and LinkedIn took a different route on April 1 with an office-themed party in New York for former accountant John Summit ahead of his album CTRL ESCAPE. Spotify built the guest list from his top listeners in the city, the same superfan targeting that drives its Reserved ticketing program.

It isn’t only media companies. McDonald’s let DJ Snake turn its Champs-Élysées restaurant in Paris into a late-night rave in June 2023 to launch his signature meal and a Pardon My French capsule collection, then brought in Loud Luxury to DJ Grimace’s birthday party in Chicago in June 2025. Dave & Buster’s started hosting ticketed arcade raves at its Hollywood location in early 2023, selling more than 1,000 tickets within an hour, then rolled the format out to cities from Miami to Brooklyn with the Brownies & Lemonade crew among its partners.

The vampire test

Not everyone in the scene would call these raves. London DJ and NTS Radio host Toshiki Ohta told the Journal that brands risk looking vampiric when they take from rave culture without giving anything back, and that earning a place takes years of steady support. The brand he held up as having done it was Red Bull, which he credited with “quite a significant financial and cultural contribution” to dance music.

Red Bull’s 28-year head start

Red Bull Music Academy started in Berlin in 1998 as a traveling bootcamp for up-and-coming producers and DJs, counted Flying Lotus, Nina Kraviz and Objekt among its alumni, and ran for more than 20 years before it shut down along with Red Bull Radio on October 31, 2019.

The brand never left the festival grounds. At Coachella, the Red Bull Mirage returned for its second year in April as a three-story, 20,000-square-foot hospitality space with DJ sets, a club looking out on the Quasar stage and Nobu omakase on reservation. At Ultra, Red Bull is hard to miss anywhere in Bayfront Park. Past editions have brought custom Red Bull booths wrapped in its blue, red and yellow graphics and a big blue Red Bull tent, and in March this year it was the official energy drink, running a two-story bar by the main stage with a VIP viewing deck up top plus a shipping container bar. Its tents and bars are a fixture at Canadian festivals too, from VELD in Toronto to FVDED in the Park in Surrey.

It also throws its own. Red Bull teamed up with Brightline in 2024 on NEXT STOP: ULTRA, a train takeover with DJ sets from Orlando to Miami. On June 20 this year, Red Bull Midsummer ran daytime events in New York, Tokyo, Mumbai, Vienna, Berlin, London and Los Angeles, linked by a live broadcast over 28 hours. Lineups were built with local promoters and collectives, putting FISHER, Jyoty, DJ Seinfeld and TOKiMONSTA alongside homegrown acts.

Celsius powers Breakaway

Celsius took the newer route of attaching itself to one festival brand and growing with it. It signed on as presenting sponsor of Breakaway for all 10 tour stops in 2024, then renewed for 2025 as Breakaway expanded to 12 cities, adding a Celsius Vibe House with games and sampling, hydration stations and pre-show fitness classes with festival DJs. Breakaway’s 2026 run grew again to 14 cities, presented once more by Celsius. Three straight years as presenting sponsor while the tour keeps adding markets is about as clear a sign of a partnership working as the festival business offers.

Lululemon runs it back with John Summit

Lululemon has its own dance music tradition in Vancouver. SeaWheeze, the half marathon it launched in 2012, finishes with a Sunset Festival, and after the last in-person race in 2019 and two virtual pandemic editions, it went dark for years. It returned this August with John Summit headlining the Sunset Festival at Brockton Oval in Stanley Park, and lululemon says nearly 10,000 runners from 24 countries took part while 15,000 people came out for the party.

Summit and lululemon had been building toward that for a while. In September 2025, he joined a lululemon community run at The Vessel in New York that ended with a surprise DJ set on the High Line, and a month later he soundtracked a lululemon sunrise HIIT class in Boulder hours before playing to more than 50,000 people at Folsom Field. At his Experts Only Ski Weekender in Whistler in March, lululemon ran Mat Pilates, yoga and sound bath sessions at the Audain Art Museum, and the two now sell a co-branded Experts Only // lululemon tech tee built for running, training and skiing.

BeatBox puts DJs on its art car

BeatBox started in 2012 at the University of Texas at Austin, took $1 million from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank in 2014, and built its brand at festivals, showing up at more than 300 festivals and live events in 2025. Its BoomBox Art Car rolls through Insomniac festivals, including EDC Las Vegas and HARD Summer this year, and it returns for two nights at Escape Halloween on October 30 and 31. For Dreamstate SoCal 2024, it ran a DJ casting call through Insomniac’s Discovery Project that gave selected unknowns a set on the art car, festival passes and $500 toward travel. That’s the kind of detail that separates sponsoring a rave from feeding one. Anheuser-Busch agreed in December 2025 to buy 85% of BeatBox for $490 million.

Ghost goes all in on Insomniac

Las Vegas-area energy brand Ghost made the biggest single bet of the group. In May 2023, it signed a multi-year deal to become the exclusive energy drink at every Insomniac festival and event, debuting at EDC Las Vegas with a glow-in-the-dark Wide Awake Watermelon can and bars along Rainbow Road. More EDC flavors followed, including Electric Limeade in 2024 and Kinetic Colada for the 30th anniversary in May, and Ghost now sits behind the bars at everything from EDC to Beyond Wonderland. Keurig Dr Pepper agreed in 2024 to buy a 60% stake in the company for $990 million, so the budget for this kind of presence isn’t going anywhere. By Ohta’s measure, Ghost is three years into a test Red Bull has been passing for nearly three decades.

Festivals put brand names on the stages

EDC Las Vegas shows how deep brand programming now runs at a major festival. Alongside the BeatBox art car, this year’s 30th anniversary edition had eight art cars and side stages, and three of them carried a sponsor’s name on the sign: the Takis Zone, the Electrolit Hydration House and CASA BACARDÍ at Daisy Fields.

Hip-hop festivals sell the same real estate. When Rolling Loud set up at Camping World Stadium in Orlando in May for its only US edition of the year, its main stage was the Under Armour Stage, where headliners including Don Toliver and Playboi Carti performed. Under Armour signed on as the festival’s exclusive performance apparel partner and built a Fit For The Pit hub with recovery and fitness lounges, giveaways and limited-edition Rolling Loud x Under Armour gear.

Coachella runs its brand programming on an even bigger scale. BizBash’s roundup of this year’s top Coachella activations ran to 30 entries, from Coca-Cola’s retro Pop Shop diner to Pinterest’s phone-free space. The one with the longest run is Heineken, which marked its 23rd year as Coachella’s official beer in April, and hosting Heineken House stage at Coachella every year since 2014.

The brands that skip the party

Some of the clearest passes on Ohta’s test have nothing to do with a branded stage. Jägermeister’s Save the Night campaign, launched in 2020, has run a grant fund for nightlife projects since 2022 alongside RA and London’s fabric. The 2025 pot was €156,000 for projects built around safety, inclusion and sustainability, and Jägermeister counts more than 1,200 projects supported across over 60 countries since the campaign began. Boiler Room, HBO’s partner on the Industry night, has a long-running brand relationship of its own. Ballantine’s has backed Boiler Room’s True Music series since the mid-2010s, and the pair marked 10 years together in 2024 with 10 events across cities like London and Johannesburg plus 10 grants for local music organizations and collectives.

After the campaign ends

HBO’s marketing lead was upfront with the Journal that its parties are built to make people feel a show, not to throw a rave for its own sake. That’s an honest pitch, and a free Boiler Room night with a strong local lineup is a good deal for the people inside. The brands ravers trust earned it the slow way, through academies, grants, art car slots and festivals that kept running long after any one campaign. Whether this year’s newcomers join them comes down to Ohta’s test: who is still paying into the scene once the show has wrapped and the album cycle is over.

Watch The Dare’s set from the Boiler Room x HBO’s Industry night below.

Source: The Wall Street Journal