IMS Ibiza

The electronic music industry's annual summit, and the only single-genre event in this directory.

• Three days on the island every April. The 2026 edition was the 17th, themed Reclaim The Dancefloor.
• Founded in 2007 by a team including Pete Tong.
• Built around business, culture, technology and the health of the people working in it.
• IMS has confirmed a 2027 return but had not published dates, venue or badge prices when this page went up.

Yes — and the narrowness is the value.

• The room is electronic: labels, platforms, promoters, agencies, artists and the technology companies that serve them.
• The programme assumes you already know how the sector works, which means sessions start where a general conference would finish.
• If electronic music is your business, that saves you two days. If it is not, this is the wrong trip and Reeperbahn Festival or The Great Escape will serve you better.

No — and this catches people out every year.

• IMS closes with a party inside Dalt Vila, the fortified old town above Ibiza Town. It is the image the summit is known for.
• It is not included in the delegate badge. Delegates buy a reduced-price bolt-on alongside registration.
• There is no door option. If you want to be there, buy it when you register.
• The Brave Space, run by HE.SHE.THEY., exists specifically for first-time and solo delegates — an unusually direct answer to the problem of arriving somewhere alone.

Book it if you are:

• An electronic artist or producer with a business to run rather than a demo to place. This is the boardroom side of the sector.
• A label, distributor or platform in dance music. The market study IMS publishes each year is the sector’s reference document, and the people who write and use it are in the room.
• A promoter or festival booker. Late April sits ahead of the Ibiza season and the European summer, which is not an accident.
• A technology company selling into music. The 2026 AI slate ran with AlphaTheta and drew Deezer, Bandcamp and Voice-Swap on stage.

Skip it if you are:

The deepest single slate in this directory — five sessions that form a coherent argument rather than a scattering.

• Keynote: Maria Garrido — The AI Divide. Deezer’s CMO on how synthetic content is shifting what audiences accept as real. Deezer is the platform that has actually published numbers on AI upload volume, so this is not hypothetical from that chair.
• AI — Inside The Moral Revolution, presented by AFEM. Aly Gillani of Bandcamp, Declan McGlynn of Voice-Swap, Maria Garrido of Deezer and the artist Mathame, moderated by AFEM’s Jay Ahern. Framed bluntly: AI “is no longer knocking at the door of electronic music; it is inside the room.”
• Mathame presents NEO. An artist project rather than a panel — a touring mythology built around human-AI coexistence.
• AFEM x AIxchange. Ralph Böege of Paradise Worldwide on consent-based licensing of recordings, compositions and metadata, building on the AFEM AI Principles and the Berlin AI Think Tank.
• Elevator Pitch: Voice-Swap. Declan McGlynn on voice models as a licensable asset class.

Read together those cover perception, ethics, culture, rights and commerce — more complete than most dedicated AI conferences manage.

Rated track, with one caveat: IMS does not print a track name. These were announced as one strand with a partner and a shared frame, which is what a series is, but you will not find an “AI Track” label on the schedule. Two of the five come through AFEM, whose own AI Principles and Think Tank function as a programme in their own right.

Set against The NAMM Show, which has an actual named AI programme, IMS has less signposting and more substance. If AI in music is why you are choosing, those two are the shortlist.