With positive reactions to the new location – Ultra day one was shaping up well. After a long day, Friday has concluded. Overall, Friday had a perfect mix of music on the live-stream and at the event. With acts such as Eric Prydz & Jai Wolf unfortunately pulling out of the festival – it put a bummer on the start of the day but that was quickly forgotten with electrifying sets!

The more significant issue of the day was the traffic situation after the event, people were left stranded and had to walk. Check out this article for the whole situation.

Dog Blood Bring Out Ty Dolla $ign to Premiere New Track

Dog Blood brought out American rapper Ty Dolla $ign to play a track that they “made just a few days ago”. This collaboration is huge and we hope to see it soon! With the amount of unreleased music played in this set, its going to be a busy few months for these two.

Mainstage Power Outage

The main stage went dark as power completely went out around 3 PM local time as Dzeko was scheduled to take the stage. Power was out for approximately 20 minutes. Not the best start for the festival, however everything went smoothly post power out. People have noted a small part of the upper right of the LED panels wasn’t working during the day time.

Tiësto Debuts Brand New Music

Tiësto played all his fan favourite releases as well as upcoming music with artists such as Justin Caruso. There was a number of unidentified productions played, with Tiësto mentioning many collaborations in his interview beforehand; we can conclude the ID’s may have been collaborations with Jonas Blue, Sikdope and others. Tiësto has some great upcoming music!

Disappointing Marshmello Set

After a killer 12 months, Marshmello closed off Day 1’s mainstage. However not everyone was loving his set, with many generic EDM songs as well as making sure to drop tracks such as ‘Losing It‘ by FISHER – people were not exactly over the moon. He played a lot of older classics by acts such as Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses, The Killers and others which is good in moderation but overdone in this case. Marshmello also played plenty of rap/RNB throughout the set, take that as you will.

Overall many aspects of this set was cringy and wasn’t that ‘EDM‘. He played a terrific set in Melbourne for Ultra Australia.

KFC/Colonel Sanders Plays Mainstage

In what turned out to be a cringy PR move, KFC had someone with a Colonel Sanders helmet (deadmau5/Marshmello inspired) play one song on the mainstage. By checking the footage embedded below, you can clearly see people walking away from the stage. In a move that was meant to create buzz around KFC may have done the opposite, with many artists and fans complaining and being disappointed about the ‘performance’. They’re not wrong, both the track and the performance was not inline with a genuine artist.