How Is the Portola Lineup Designed? The Festival’s Founder on His ‘Mad Scientist’ Approach

“Every festival booker has their own process,” says Danny Bell, the founder and booker of San Francisco’s Portola. “Mine is definitely more mad scientist-y than other people’s.”

Bell’s metaphorical lab is a spreadsheet, which he begins tinkering with a year before the festival itself. The sheet allows Bell to see “all the different looks at once,” he says. “You have your money grid, your mock set times, your poster.” He’s made algorithms that let him organize it by an artist’s subgenre, gender, race and home country. There’s one designed around when the sun sets and when there’s full dark. He works to select a group of artists who are unlikely to play any of the same tracks twice over the weekend.

“Can you do it quicker?” Bell, the SVP of talent at Goldenvoice, asks rhetorically while talking to Billboard over Zoom from his office in San Francisco. “For sure. There’s probably a much simpler way, but I do it like this. I want to make sure to have all these different visualizations because this stuff is is important. It all works together.”

From these datasets eventually emerge the lineup and set times for Portola, which since its 2022 debut has become a dance festival circuit standout for putting artists who helped develop the dance/electronic genre alongside many of the moment’s most essential stars and emerging artists. Every year Bell also reserves a set time for a pop icon, a space that in 2025 belongs to Christina Aguilera, who Bell promises will perform “banger after banger.”

While Portola has put a whole host of big names in front of the 40,000-person crowd that gathers at the festival site at San Francisco’s Pier 80 (past headliners have included Flume, The Chemical Brothers, Eric Prydz, Skrillex, Rüfüs du Sol and Justice), this year puts an especially heavy emphasis on “showcasing the legends and pioneers of the scene and some of the most influential people the last 30 years,” Bell says. “This lineup is a real ode to to where the current sounds and state of electronic music came from.”

He’s not being hyperbolic. The fest this weekend (Sept. 20-21) will unpack the influence of the ’90s era U.K. underground via sets from Underworld, The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, all of whom bent electronic music to harder, darker and more intense shapes during their heydays. There will also be U.S. artists whose work functioned as inflection points for the development of indie dance and dance punk — namely LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture and Moby. The Rapture’s performance comes towards the start of a reunion tour happening fifteen years after the NYC group’s last headlining run. Meanwhile Moby, who hasn’t toured the U.S. extensively in years, will perform with a live band and run through much of his 1999 LP Play, an album whose prolific syncing helped introduce electronic music to a generation of young people living far from clubland.

These acts are matched by several of the moment’s key scene stars, with the lineup’s other big font names being Peggy Gou, Dom Dolla, Mau P and Chris Lake and Chris Lorenzo playing as Anti Up.

“We now have fans who’ve been deep in the genre for 15-plus years, but 2010, 2011 and 2012 were the early days of electronic music being popular in the U.S.,” says Bell, who in this era was booking shows for HARD in Los Angeles. “Back then everyone was just learning about these artists for the first time. No one knew if Carl Cox was a new act or a legacy act.”

But with the people who got into dance music in this era now staring down middle age, “people have had enough time to dig deeper into the history and really understand who the pioneers were and where these sounds came from,” says Bell. “That’s allowed acts like The Chemical Brothers and Underworld to have a stronger and larger U.S. fanbase than they had before.”

To wit, a new wave of demand for these acts manifested in The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy both drawing huge crowds at Coachella 2023 and 2025, respectively. Meanwhile Underworld’s Boiler Room set from London has clocked 1.4 million views since it was put online three weeks ago.

“When I started in festivals, the acts that were being played on Spotify Mint [the streamer’s mainstream dance playlist] were like, Alesso and Avicii,” says Bell. “It was all progressive house and some dubstep.”

With Mint now populated by artists like Sammy Virji, Fred again.., Sara Landry, Ki/Ki and Kettama — all of who have played Portola in years past or who will be there this year — Bell says it’s been “really fun and rewarding to see the acts I work with who I’ve considered left of center and really progressing the sound and the scene making their way up the ladder to be the artists Spotify Mint is programming.”

There’s also the lineup contingent Bell lovingly and correctly refers to as “the divas.” In 2023 this was Nelly Furtado, who performed her ’00s-defining hits “Turn Off the Light,” “I’m Like a Bird,” “Say It Right” and “Promiscuous.” Last year, Natasha Bedingfield drew a tightly packed crowd that included fellow lineup artist Four Tet, while performing her pop holy trinity of “Pocketful of Sunshine,” “These Words” and “Unwritten.” This year, Aguilera is teed up to deliver her own arsenal of generational anthems.

“She knows what the assignment is,” says Bell — who also places previous Portola artists like Cobrah, Slayyter and Charli xcx in this diva category, a realm of the lineup that will also be filled by Ravyn Lenae this weekend.

Delivering these pop moments has helped Portola carve out a kind of quirky, if-it-feels-good-do-it identity that also manifests on the event’s Instagram, a channel that’s often deliciously unhinged and IYKYK funny.

“That’s another part of the ethos of the festival,” Bell says. “It’s very serious music, but presented in a very unserious way.”

The social media team of ten includes Bell, other staffers at Portola’s producer Goldenvoice (which also puts on Coachella) and a team from the marketing and creative agency Benchmob. The secret sauce is Bell’s longtime friend Dashiell Driscoll, a comedy writer whose resume includes the After Midnight With Taylor Tomlinson and a run at Funny or Die.

“I call him our staff copywriter,” says Bell. “I have him write our e-blasts and captions. Working with a real comedy writer, I can say ‘Hey, we need to tell people we’re 100 days out from the festival,’ and he comes back with 12 different ideas. (The idea the team ultimately went with was a “100 types of people you’ll meet 100 days from now at Portola,” IG carousel featuring 100 photos of many varieties of raver, along with Steve Harvey, Parker Posey, Ariana Grande, dogs, cats, a goose and other individuals with that special flair.)

“Let’s be real,” Bell continues. “There are a ton of festival social media pages and lots of other music pages and accounts that are all kind of similar. Anything I get that looks like something anyone else would post I’m like, ‘Come on, we an do better. Let’s try a little harder.’”

This extra effort extends beyond the internet and even beyond the festival site. Call it the mad scientist in him, but Bell cites a “strange obsession” of “always wanting people to have programming or something to do at all times of the day. I don’t expect everyone to do everything. It’s more just having these options so people can choose their own adventure, whether they want to start early then go to the festival, or go to the festival then to an afterparty.”

This year these afterparties are also happening before the fest. This is Portola’s most robust year of tangential programming, with Portola-blessed clubs nights starting Thursday (Sept. 18) and extending clear through Monday at more than ten local venues. “It’s exciting that we could do upwards of 40,000-plus tickets a day at the festival, plus sell an additional 30,000 tickets for the after shows throughout the weekend,” says Bell.

The goal is also to compliment what’s happening musically with Portola picks of things to do around with, with the festival partnering with a variety of restaurants, clothing shops and fitness centers. “One of Portola’s main concepts is just reminding people about how amazing San Francisco is,” Bell says, “and not just as a city to live and visit, but also as a place to party. We really want to bring the city to life over these four days.”

And yes, Bell is already working on the spreadsheet for next year.