An embracive interview with C3's Festival Director, Brad Parker, who says Bonnaroo's new Infinity Stage "makes you feel like you are in the experience, and not at it."
What if a stage wasn't just a place to watch live music, but a portal that pulled you right into the heart of it? That's the promise of Bonnaroo's new Infinity Stage, which will transform the festival's Centeroo atmosphere in 2025.
The innovative stage, which Bonnaroo claims is "the world's largest 360° spatial audio experience," will tower over the other six preexisting structures in the festival's central hub. However, Brad Parker, Festival Director at Bonnaroo's organizer C3 Presents, describes Infinity is a "perfect additive" that will amplify the energy without altering the event's course.
Parker paints a picture of the open-air stage as more like fuel poured on an already roaring fire, with electronic dance music as the gasoline. He says the genre is the largest growing subculture within Bonnaroo's storied grounds at Great Stage Park, underscoring its rising dominance in today's festival landscape.
"The EDM scene of now is very reminiscent of the jam band scene of the early 2000s, a quiet but powerful underground culture making waves across the entire scene," Parker tells EDM.com. "Bonnaroo has always been about offering the best in the streets. It’s quite literally the origin of our namesake. EDM is the most popular it’s ever been, and The Infinity will be the most advanced production for soundscape we have ever had."
The inaugural Infinity lineup boasts a stacked lineup of electronic acts, including a rare collaborative DJ set from Of The Trees and Tape B, who were named to EDM.com's Class of 2024 and Class of 2025, respectively. It will also feature a highly anticipated takeover by Experts Only, the brand launched by dance music superstar John Summit, which was recently honored as 2024's best record label in our list of the year's top industry leaders.
The next-gen stage comes from Polygon Live, a renowned music tech firm out of the UK. It will incorporate spatial audio and a fully synchronized, state-of-the-art lighting system to create a multi-sensory live audio environment the likes of which has never been experienced by festival-goers, Parker said, citing Polygon.
"When Polygon Live said they could present audio to us at scale in a way that music festival fans had never heard, of course we were intrigued," he recalls. "The real creative process comes through the programming itself and the artists we are putting onstage. You will hear some once-in-a-lifetime performances from these artists on Infinity because you have never heard their music presented quite like this before."
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The phrase "immersive" has been beaten into oblivion by the music industry, but it seems Infinity has earned the title. Polygon's ambitions are becoming reality as they develop the stage's production, which will disperse bleeding-edge spatial audio across three massive hemispherical domes.
"What we are attempting to do with Infinity is to audio what the Sphere is to video," Parker says.
He realized the remarkable potential of Infinity when he experienced a smaller version of its production at Thailand's Wonderfruit Festival back in December 2024. While it felt like dancing inside a state-of-the-art club, Parker says he was actually partying in the middle of a field, completely swept away by spatial audio that "really makes you feel like you are in the experience, and not at it."
Polygon Productions
Infinity could serve as a harbinger of where Bonnaroo is headed in the future. The festival's team, Parker says, will continue to learn, adapt and push the envelope as they embrace new technologies and opportunities to improve the fan experience.
He cautions, however, that evolving Bonnaroo's onsite experience must strike a careful balance between experimentation and reverence for the festival's storied legacy.
"Bonnaroo is one of the few festivals that has had the privilege now to serve multiple generations of fans," Parker explains. "Our biggest task is honoring and thanking those fans that got us through the first 20 years, while also looking forward to curating for the community of fans who will get us through our next 20."
"This is accomplished by paying modern day homage to our jam band roots," he continues, "with recent bookings like Goose, JRAD, Eggy and more while also focusing on what the younger generation is interested in, such as Olivia Rodrigo and elevating our EDM programming. Life is all about balance."
As spatial audio technology rapidly transforms music as we know it, with even the inventor of the MP3 racing to revolutionize, Bonnaroo is finding the sweet spot between innovation and authenticity. True to form, the festival is embracing the future of live music while staying true to its roots: vast azure skies, camping camaraderie and the kind of communal energy you can only find on The Farm.
"Festivals will always be special sacred places and testing grounds for new experiences," Parker says. "There is something about a festival that can’t quite be replicated in an arena or amphitheater, and it’s our jobs to tap into exactly what this is to stay fresh and keep evolving. There will always be a demand for live music, and we hope to be at the center of that craving."
"At the end of the day, we build worlds and create communities. If we can do that, we win big."
You can view the full lineup for the inaugural Infinity Stage below and purchase tickets to Bonnaroo 2025 here.
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