Nashville’s sustainability-minded EDM festival is expanding

Deep Tropics Music, Art and Style Festival is moving to Labor Day weekend next year with an extended three-day schedule.

The small electronic festival started in 2017 with just 2,500 people. Subsequent years brought crowds of about 6,000-9,000.

But this year, the two-day attendance ballooned to 15,000.

Courtesy Connor Morss

Festivalgoers dance in Bicentennial Park in Nashville on August 16, 2025.

Just weeks after the sold-out success, organizers announced that the next festival at Bicentennial Park will grow to three days between Sept. 4-6, 2026. The new schedule will allow for more partygoers and artists, and the later date might benefit from slightly cooler temperatures.

Deep Tropics will still center its custom sustainability measures: The festival offers aluminum cups and refill stations for water instead of plastic water bottles, which are made from fossil fuel derivatives known as petrochemicals.

This year, about 90% of the waste inside the grounds was recycled or composted, overseen by volunteer sorters at waste stations.

“As Deep Tropics grows, maintaining sustainability isn’t enough. We have to expand it right alongside the festival,” said festival co-founder Blake Atchison.

The festival partnered with consultant Oonus Moondus to design a framework to reduce materials and greenhouse gas emissions, while ensuring that the event’s expansion is coupled “with stronger accountability, new innovation, and even greater impact, so our commitment to people and planet scales with us,” Atchison said.