What a Festival Lineup Is Made Of: 276 Artists by Billing and Genre

By Fesnova·Published Oct 26, 2026

A lineup poster is designed to be read top-down: the giant names first, then rows of ever-smaller type. That's also how most people read it, which means most of the poster never gets read at all. This site catalogued every artist on two very different 2026 festivals, Lollapalooza in Chicago and Elements in the Poconos, and tagged each one by billing tier and primary genre. Here's what a lineup is actually made of when you count the whole thing.

Three-quarters of a festival is the undercard

The two festivals are built for different crowds, but their pyramids look alike. Headliners are one artist in fifteen to twenty, and the undercard is two-thirds to three-quarters of the bill. Lollapalooza's pyramid is a little steeper: more artists overall, and a larger share of them in the small type.

That has a practical consequence. If you only plan around the headliners and major acts, you're planning around about a quarter to a third of what's on offer, and the undercard is also what fills the early-afternoon slots, when you have the most freedom to move between stages. It's the reason this site publishes an Undercard Picks guide for each festival and a general method for finding undercard artists you'll like.

Genre counts are misleading

Count the distinct primary genres on each bill and Elements looks like the more varied festival: 22 genre labels against Lollapalooza's 14. But that's backwards. Elements is an electronic festival; Lollapalooza spans pop, rock, indie, hip-hop, and electronic music.

The explanation is the vocabulary. Electronic music is described in fine-grained subgenres (bass, bass house, tech house, dubstep, melodic dubstep, drum & bass, UK garage), so an all-electronic bill produces many labels. A genre-spanning bill uses broad ones: “Indie” and “Rock” each cover dozens of quite different artists.

Group Elements' labels into families and the picture corrects itself. 57 of 105 artists sit in the bass family (bass, dubstep, bass house, drum & bass, and their offshoots), another 38 in house and techno, and just 10 in everything else combined. Lollapalooza's biggest blocks are indie and rock (61 artists together), then electronic and EDM (37), then the pop family, including K-pop and J-pop (36). Those are three large blocks of roughly similar size, which is what a genuinely genre-spanning festival looks like.

A better measure of range than the raw label count is how evenly artists are spread across labels. One standard way is the “effective number” of genres: the inverse of the sum of each genre's squared share. By that measure the two bills come out close, at 8.1 for Lollapalooza and 7.3 for Elements, despite Elements having eight more labels. In plain terms, Elements has more names for things, and Lollapalooza spreads its artists more evenly across what it has.

The top of the bill is the most varied part

Both festivals spread their headliners across six different primary genres: six labels for eight headliners at Lollapalooza, six for seven at Elements. The undercard concentrates. At Lollapalooza, indie, rock, and pop alone account for 65 of the 126 undercard artists; at Elements, bass and the house styles account for most of its 71. The headliners are chosen to pull in different crowds, and the undercard is where each festival's core identity shows.

Same artist, different billing

Seven names appear on both bills: Ayybo, Boys Noize, Jackie Hollander, KETTAMA, Know Good, MPH, and Westend. Their placement shows how relative billing is. Boys Noize was in the undercard at Lollapalooza and a major act at Elements, because the same electronic artist ranks higher on an electronic bill. KETTAMA was a major act at both. Where a name sits on a poster tells you as much about the festival as about the artist.

How to use this

• Read the bottom half of the poster first. It's most of the festival, and it's where your own taste matters more than the promoter's marketing.
• Don't judge a festival's range by its genre tags. Group them into families, or look at the per-festival breakdowns in our Lollapalooza and Elements genre guides.
• Check billing against the schedule. Billing tier roughly tracks set length and time slot, which is covered in our analysis of all 296 sets.

About these numbers

Every artist on this site has one hand-assigned primary genre and a billing tier that follows the festival's official lineup poster, as described in how Fesnova is researched. Genre tags are an editorial judgment, and the two festivals' tags were assigned with the vocabulary their own scenes use, which is exactly why raw label counts mislead. The “same artist” list matches names across the two rosters. The families used above group this site's own labels. For Elements, the bass family is Bass, Dubstep, Bass House, Drum & Bass, Melodic Dubstep, Global Bass, Glitch-Hop, Future Bass, and UK Garage; the house and techno family is House, Tech House, Techno, Electro, and Trance. For Lollapalooza, the pop family is Pop, K-Pop, J-Pop, and Alt Pop.

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