Your Perfect Festival · Result
The Lanyard Festival
Panels by day, showcases by night, and everyone is wearing a name.
Designed rarity: about 5% of takers
You are at your happiest with a plastic card round your neck that gets you into both the panels and the showcases. You are usually there for the six conversations rather than the six sets, and you leave with people who will actually pick up the phone. Seoul runs two that suit you, Zandari Festa across the Hongdae venues and MU:CON for the industry end, and you tend to find a familiar face at both.
You plan your days carefully: panels in the morning, a showcase crawl at night, and the walks in between treated as meetings. This is the only festival format where a queue is a useful place to stand, and you know it, so you talk to everybody in it. You are curious about what comes next, and you like a room full of people building it.
Your strength
You leave with six people who will actually pick up the phone.
Your blind spot
Half watching the good sets while checking who came in can mean you rarely listen properly.
Key takeaways
- You came for the six conversations, not the six sets.
- It is the one format where the queue is a useful place to stand.
- Give one set a night your full, undivided attention.
Rooms to try in Seoul
- Zandari Festa, Hongdae, Mapo: A whole district turned into one badge, the way this format works best without a convention centre.
- MU:CON, Seoul: The industry side in daylight and showcases at night, and the Korean event where the panels are the draw.
Rooms to try around the world
- MUTEK, Montreal: A forum attached to a festival where the daytime programme is genuinely about something, which you will appreciate.
- SXSW, Austin: The largest version of this in North America, and the one that shows you exactly what the format becomes at scale.
- Amsterdam Dance Event, Amsterdam: Five days, several hundred venues, and a conference big enough to keep a connector busy all week.
Your nearest types
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