Nicholas Daniel Miller was born on December 26, 1990, in Downers Grove, Illinois. His family later lived in Seattle and in France before settling in San Francisco, where he attended St. Ignatius College Preparatory. He began producing electronic music in 2008. A 2012 Bassnectar performance at Red Rocks Amphitheatre near Denver became a turning point that deepened his commitment to music — the same year, by his own later account, he survived a heroin overdose, an experience he has since spoken about publicly and channeled into the song “Take You Down.” He relocated to Denver in 2013 and enrolled at the University of Colorado Denver, and has called the city home ever since.

Miller released his self-titled debut EP as Illenium in 2013 on Prep School Recordings. Early remixes built his profile, most notably a version of The Chainsmokers’ “Don’t Let Me Down,” which racked up more than 101 million SoundCloud streams by 2018 and was, at the time, the platform’s most-played remix. His 2016 debut album, Ashes, released through his own Kasaya Records, reached number 6 on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Albums chart, and the follow-up, Awake (2017), climbed to number 3 on that chart and number 106 on the Billboard 200. That year he also won the Electronic Music Awards’ Remix of the Year for his rework of Flume’s “Say It,” and “Crawl Outta Love” took the grand prize at the International Songwriting Competition. By 2019, Ascend became his first album to top Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Albums chart outright, also reaching number 14 on the Billboard 200 — still his highest placement on that all-genre chart.

Illenium has released six studio albums to date: Ashes (2016), Awake (2017), Ascend (2019), Fallen Embers (2021), the self-titled Illenium (2023) and Odyssey (2026). Fallen Embers earned him his first Grammy nomination, for Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 2022 ceremony. In December 2019 he was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” Music list, one of only a handful of dance-music acts to make that year’s cut. He also won International Dance Music Awards for Best Male Artist (Bass) and Best Remix (for his rework of Halsey’s “Without Me”) in 2019, and has picked up further Electronic Dance Music Awards recognitions in the years since, including a Producer of the Year win in 2023.

The 2023 self-titled album led into the “ILLENIUM LIVE” tour, a 37-date run across North America, Europe and Australia that included a show at Denver’s Empower Field at Mile High in June 2023, described by trade press at the time as one of the largest EDM headliner events staged in the US. In May 2025, Illenium signed with Republic Records after several years at Warner Records, telling Billboard the move represented “a completely new chapter.” His first album for Republic, Odyssey, arrived in February 2026 and became his fourth studio album to reach number 1 on Billboard’s Top Dance Albums chart, also charting at number 45 on the Billboard 200. To support it, he became one of the first electronic acts — following Anyma’s pioneering December 2024 run — to headline a multi-night residency inside the Sphere in Las Vegas, playing nine shows across March and April 2026. His DJ Mag Top 100 DJs standing has moved around over the years: number 64 in 2019, a career-best number 43 in 2020, then settling outside the main 100 into the magazine’s “Next 50” tier — number 124 in 2024 and number 144 in 2025.

Unlike some of his peers, Illenium has not appeared on Forbes’ “World’s Highest-Paid DJs” list, and no other trade outlet — Billboard, DJ Mag or Pollstar included — has published an audited, sourced total for his annual income. The closest verifiable proxy comes from Pollstar’s Boxoffice database: across his touring career since 2014, Illenium has submitted 173 headline box-office reports totaling 929,059 tickets sold and $59.4 million in gross revenue. That is a career-cumulative figure rather than a single year’s total, but it is a genuine, sourced indicator of scale rather than a guess.

A more specific data point comes from his 2026 Sphere residency. Pollstar’s LIVE75 chart tracked his first three March shows at a combined $8.4 million gross on 49,084 tickets sold — an average of roughly $2.8 million and 16,361 tickets per show — enough to debut at No. 3 on that chart and earn “Hot Shot” status as the week’s highest new entry. Pollstar has not published a final, audited total covering all nine residency dates, so no full-run figure is stated here.

Illenium’s current recording deal is with Republic Records, which he joined in May 2025 after previously releasing through Warner Records; as is standard across the industry, neither label has disclosed the financial terms of either agreement. His Sphere residency, promoted jointly with the venue and his touring team, likewise has no publicly disclosed contract value — only the box-office performance data cited above.

Beyond those two arrangements, several talent-booking agencies — including De La Font Agency, Booking Entertainment and Global Talent Booking — list Illenium as an available headline act for private and corporate events, but each directs enquiries to “contact for pricing” rather than publishing a fee schedule, which is standard agency marketing practice rather than a disclosed rate. No verified festival appearance fee, headline touring guarantee, or label advance figure for Illenium has been published by a credible outlet, so none is estimated here.

No conventional brand endorsement or sponsorship deal for Illenium turned up in a search of music trade press, marketing announcements or entertainment coverage — nothing resembling the shoe, fashion or spirits deals some touring DJs have signed. The one recurring partnership in his public record is with End Overdose, the harm-reduction nonprofit he began working with in April 2023, which trained volunteers at stops on his 2023 tour. That relationship is philanthropic and awareness-focused rather than a paid commercial endorsement, and it is treated as such here rather than folded into his income.

Illenium’s clearest business venture is Kasaya Records, the label he founded and used to release his own debut album, Ashes, in 2016, and which has also put out music from collaborators including Said the Sky. Beyond his own recordings, he launched Ember Shores in December 2021, an all-inclusive destination festival held on the beachfront in Cancun, Mexico, produced in partnership with the events company Festication. Structured as a resort takeover rather than a traditional festival, it caps attendance at roughly 2,000 to 3,000 fans — far below the tens of thousands at major festivals — who receive resort rooms, food and drink, and round-trip transportation bundled into the ticket. It has run annually since, growing to a fifth edition and a new home at the Barcelo Riviera Maya resort in 2026.

No other businesses, equity stakes, or investment holdings for Illenium turned up in credible reporting, so none are listed here beyond Kasaya Records and Ember Shores.

In December 2023, Illenium and his wife paid $15 million for a 23,000-square-foot mansion in Cherry Hills Village, an affluent Denver suburb, according to BusinessDen’s reporting on the area’s priciest home sales, corroborated by the Denver Post — the top local home sale that December. The eight-bedroom, 14-bathroom brick-and-stone house, built in 1993 and designed by Chicago architect Gregory Maire to resemble a 14th-century French country home, sits adjacent to the 10th green at Cherry Hills Country Club; the couple bought it from private equity executive Charlie Gallagher.

Separately, in April 2024, Illenium listed a different Denver property — a newly built, roughly 5,000-square-foot, five-bedroom, five-bathroom home at 965 S. Downing Street in the city’s Washington Park neighborhood — for sale, according to a press release from listing agent Loan Hau of HomeSmart Realty Group. That release did not disclose an asking or eventual sale price. No other specific high-value personal assets, such as vehicles or aircraft, have been reliably documented, so none are listed here beyond these two verified properties.