“It’s Called Dance Music… You Should Be Able to Dance”: How We Belong Here Is Fixing the Biggest Flaws of Music Festivals

At most music festivals, we’ve become conditioned to expect lines longer than airport security, stages crammed tighter than rush-hour subways and dancefloors on asphalt lots. We Belong Here flips each of those problems on their head.

By designing festivals around seamless access, spacious dancefloors and scenic venues, the boutique festival brand is raising the bar for the live music experience.

“It’s called dance music… you should be able to dance,” Justin Dauman and Charles Hochfelder, the co-founders of We Belong Here, tell EDM.com.

The duo grew disillusioned with the state of dance music a few years ago. They noticed that their friends, who loved going to shows, stopped going as much as they grew older. “Why does someone who loved Ultra when they were 18 not go back five or 10 years later?” Dauman wondered. “It’s not that they don’t love music anymore, but things like getting smushed in a crowd matter more.”

The COVID-19 pandemic, Dauman said, was the turning point: “After both of us lost all of our work in this industry during the pandemic, we didn’t want to jump back in unless we were doing something meaningful.”

The duo evaluated everything they didn’t like about the live music experience and launched We Belong Here to rectify the biggest pain points they found. Their core principle was that their events would have to take place in unique locations. “We do landmarks, naturally scenic settings, or places that have historical significance,” Dauman explains. “We’re tired of going to shows in warehouses and parking lots.”

In October 2021, We Belong Here held its debut event inside the former New York Stock Exchange building, transforming its historic marble halls into a club night with MEDUZA. From there, they’ve continued to choose venues with character.

In New York, that meant Pier 16, the oldest active pier in the city offering sweeping views of the New York skyline; and Governors Island, a former military base turned national park with the Statue of Liberty as its backdrop.

In Miami, they’ve brought their flagship annual music festival to Historic Virginia Key Beach Park, a waterfront oasis with panoramic views of the Atlantic Ocean; and held events inside the historic Alfred I. duPont Building, the city’s only Art Deco skyscraper built in 1939.

Credit: We Belong Here

While most organizers pack venues to the brim, Dauman and Hochfelder intentionally undersell tickets relative to venue capacity. “We genuinely just want to make the attendee experience as great as possible, sometimes to a fault where financially it doesn’t make sense for us,” Hochfelder says.

Their 360° stage concept—artists performing from the middle of the crowd without any LED walls—turns the oversized dancefloor into a circle of shared energy with room to dance and sight-lines in every direction.

All of these are measures aimed at building a sense of community that inspired the name We Belong Here. “If you feel like you belong somewhere, you don’t want to leave,” Dauman and Hochfelder believe. “And that’s one of the biggest feelings we hope to give all the attendees.”

They believe that belonging isn’t something you can slap on a flyer. “The name isn’t a gimmick,” Dauman asserts. “We even limit how often our logo appears onsite.”

Instead, it’s about “getting the little things right to ensure every attendee is a VIP.” That translates to short lines for drinks and clean, air-conditioned restroom trailers instead of grim porta-potties.

“The more time that you spend waiting for something, the more a 10-minute conversation with a stranger becomes a major inconvenience,” Dauman explains. “But if everything is convenient and smooth, you don’t feel rushed. You feel relaxed and open-minded to meet new people.”

They also offer plenty of shaded lounge areas with daybeds, cushioned seating and quiet corners, giving revelers meaningful ways to recoup between long stretches on the dancefloor.

Much of their design philosophy comes from their love of house parties. “Everyone at a house party was kind of a friend of a friend in some way, even if you didn’t know them, even if you didn’t have an interest in talking to other people, you still felt like you were at something that was a community,” Dauman and Hochfelder said.

But while house parties often come with the chaos and rowdiness of youth, We Belong Here isn’t chasing that energy. Instead, they’re focused on designing events for a “mature audience.”

Most music festivals are either 18+ or all-ages. We Belong Here events are strictly 21+. “Maturity isn’t just about being older,” Dauman expands. “It’s about where you are in life. We’re not here to judge people who just want to party and get wild—but our energy goes into creating something for people who want music, dancing, and community to be part of their lives long-term.”

In practice, this doesn’t mean door policies or concrete ways to curate the crowd. Instead, they believe that all the principles they build their events on will create a domino effect of people self-selecting themselves into the mature audience We Belong Here aims to cultivate.

“I think we realized we were onto something after our first Miami festival in 2022,” Hochfelder recalls. “We were getting so many compliments on the crowd. Especially on Reddit, which is a brutal place, so Redditors would be cutthroat if they didn’t resonate with We Belong Here.”

That validation gave them the confidence to scale on their own terms. Over the past four years hosting shows and festivals in Miami and New York, Dauman and Hochfelder have resisted the temptation to grow too fast. They’re constantly weighing how to expand without sacrificing the intimacy that defines We Belong Here.

“It’s a challenge we’re battling every single day,” Dauman admits.

As the team grows, they’ve made a point of bringing in people who first experienced We Belong Here as fans. “Everything we did to get Miami off the ground is now the responsibility of someone on our team who’s truly passionate about it,” he explains about their hiring practices.

Balancing growth with intimacy also means drawing boundaries on scale. “We don’t want to be Ultra or Coachella size,” Hochfelder says. “We’d rather expand to more cities than do bigger-sized events. Once you hit over 30,000 people, it’s so much harder to control the quality.”

That “combination of being patient but resilient” is what led to their three-day boutique festival in Central Park last year. “If we had a very specific timeline that everything had to happen by, it wouldn’t have happened. But we were dead set that if we were going to do something in New York, it needed to be truly special and unique.”

Originally planned for 2023, they had to push back their timeline a full year to fine-tune their execution and minimize external risks and pressure. “It’s arguably the most famous park in the world, we had to be very meticulous and careful,” Dauman says about building the operational muscle at the level Central Park demanded.

When it finally took place in 2024, their takeover of Central Park’s storied Wollman Rink was a roaring success. Featuring headliners like Kaskade, FISHER and Monolink as well as local talent like Ria Mehta, Shahar and Stello, the curation fits We Belong Here’s ethos of “mixing ‘commercial’ and ‘underground’ artists in a tasteful way that appeals equally to the seasoned fan of dance music and those with no prior attachment to the genre.”

Credit: We Belong Here

After proving a dance music festival could thrive in Central Park, Dauman and Hochfelder are bringing We Belong Here back to Wollman Rink next weekend for another three-day takeover. This year’s headliners include Lane 8, Porter Robinson and Nora En Pure.

But the return to Central Park is only half the New York story this year. For the first time, We Belong Here is expanding across the river with a Brooklyn debut in Greenpoint, turning the neighborhood’s waterfront into what they describe as an oasis.

Unlike the Central Park lineup, which largely features melodic house, the Greenpoint lineup has a different theme each night. Friday kicks off with a “high-energy start to the weekend” led by SIDEPIECE and Gordo. Saturday shifts gears into a “ride through indie and experimental sounds” with Elderbrook and MGMT. And Sunday closes with a journey “rooted in deep sounds and emotional builds” from Franky Wah and Carl Cox.

However, for Dauman and Hochfelder, the most rewarding part of running We Belong Here isn’t sold-out shows or big-name bookings.

“Being able to provide opportunities on our team for people who really need it—and give them a platform to make the scene better—that’s the most rewarding part,” Dauman says. “I know how hard it is to break into this industry, even just trying to get an internship is so difficult.”

It’s the serendipitous moments at the end of a festival weekend for Hochfelder. “Usually at the end I get pretty emotional,” he gushes. “I look out and think, how the heck did we do this? Seeing people off the dancefloor with their arm around their partner or just sitting with friends and laughing, it’s indescribable, I’m even getting a little emotional just thinking about it.”

Get tickets for We Belong Here’s New York events here.