Defqon.1

The festival was previously held in mid-June on Almeerderstrand in Almere. Since 2011, it is hosted on the event site next to Walibi Holland in Biddinghuizen. Since 2009, the event has also been hosted in Sydney in mid-September, at the Sydney International Regatta Centre. Until 2011 (2014 for the Australian edition) the festival ran for 12 hours, from 11:00 am to 11:00 pm, and ended with a firework display. Since 2012, the festival was extended to three days. Since 2015, the Australian edition was extended to two days. On 29 May 2019, it was announced that the Sydney festival would no longer be held, after being unable to secure a new venue: the Sydney International Regatta Centre had withdrawn its support for the event amid scrutiny over drug overdoses at the 2018 edition.^[3][4] Defqon.1 was also briefly organized in Chile. The festival took place in 2015 and 2016 at Centro de Eventos Munich in Peñaflor, near Santiago, before being discontinued.

2020 did not see Defqon.1 held after the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte declared that all events in the Netherlands were cancelled until September 2020 due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Defqon.1 was held virtually in 2021, with sets from participating performers streamed from the Defqon.1 website.^[5] The festival was held in person again in 2022, with over 100.000 unique visitors.^[6] The 2025 edition marked the festival's 25th anniversary; the Sunday programming featured an extended five-hour set chronicling the history of the genre, featuring appearances by 61 producers.^[7]

Due to the 2026 European heatwaves, organizers initially announced on Thursday, 25 June, that it would not admit single-day ticketholders for Friday and Saturday, in order to reduce crowd sizes as a safety measure down to 55,000 per day.^[8] On Midnight, 26 June, it was announced that the festival had been cancelled in full due to the Code Red extreme heat warning issued by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. Q-dance stated that all ticketholders would be refunded.^[9][10]

The festival's format has traditionally featured colour-coded stages, each devoted to specific genres of hard dance and related genres, and running for all or part of the event. The Red stage is traditionally the main outdoor stage, serving as the site of the main headlining acts and other recurring features, including the headlining "Spotlight" set closing Friday night, the "Power Hour" on Saturday afternoon,^[11] the "Legends" set on Sunday featuring veteran acts, and closing ceremony displays on Saturday and Sunday.^[12][13] In 2017 and 2025, the Legends set was instead an extended, chronological set highlighting the history of hardstyle up to that point.^[14][15][7]

The Blue stage serves as the main indoor stage; it hosts an opening day on Thursday known as "The Gathering", and then primarily focuses on rawstyle for the remainder of the festival. The Black stage primarily focuses on hardcore, the UV stage focuses on euphoric and uptempo music, the Yellow stage focuses primarily on uptempo hardcore and frenchcore, Indigo focuses on raw and extraraw, while Magenta focuses on "classic" music, Purple focuses on up-and-coming acts, and Green focuses on hard techno.^{[16][17][12][13]}

• List of electronic music festivals