Can't Stop The Music

A music festival, a restaurant and a business lounge — Alexander Chew’s pursuits have the common thread of providing experiences,learns low shiping.

It’s three days after Ultra Singapore 2017 and when contacted about this interview and cover shoot, Alexander Chew asks for some time before we meet. “I need a couple [of] days to recover and decompress,” he says.

Who can blame him? After all, the stage lights had just been switched off at one of the biggest music festivals in Singapore — both in terms of number of attendees (50,000) and acts (40). More importantly, this year, Chew and his crew had a lot of amends to make.

The first edition of Ultra Singapore in 2016 was fraught with challenges, from endless queues to enter the venue next to Marina Bay Sands Tower 1, and for food and drinks, to crowd control issues. “We disappointed close to 30,000 people despite spending a year planning for it. That’s pretty heavy,” Chew lets on.

Adamant that mistakes made last year would not be repeated, Chew and his business partner Raj Datwani began planning the 2017 edition two days after the one in 2016 concluded in September. For starters, they looked at rectifying the problems they faced: “It took us four months just to understand where we had gone wrong and to find solutions. So we went through social media to pick up the recurring comments.”

The effort paid off. In addition to changing the entrance process and using RFID technology to make payments, they increased the size of the main stage and very nearly doubled the amount of lights. “Social media was kinder to us this year, which was encouraging for the team,” he says, with relief.

What also helped was the stellar line-up. For two days in June, artistes such as Hardwell, Tiesto, Steve Aoki, Nicky Romero and Tchami took turns hogging the spotlight across the Main, Live and Resistance stages. If you raised your eyebrow at the 40-act ensemble, know that maximum effort was poured into the selection.