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 With more festivals per capita than any other country, the Swiss market is fields ahead, but will the grass remain as green in the future?
If Europe in general is basking in a golden age of live music, Switzerland is the market that makes all the others look like they aren’t pushing the festival concept quite hard enough.
The famously packed Swiss festival calendar thrives out of all proportion to the country’s 7.5 million population, offering legendary international brands such as the Montreux Jazz Festival, as well as routinely successful, big-hitting events including Paléo Nyon, St. Gallen and Frauenfeld and numerous more modest contenders.
“We have a really special situation in Switzerland – there are lots and lots of festivals; there’s a big festival culture,” says Sébastien Vuignier, talent booker for Paléo and concert promoter Opus One.
Last year certainly seemed to bring nothing but good news from Switzerland as its big-name festivals witnessed record turnouts and rebounded from a 2006 spent in the shadow of the German World Cup.
The weather was typically unpredictable, of course, but festivals such as Paléo Nyon, Montreux and Gampel (in the French speaking western part of the country); St Gallen, Frauenfeld, Greenfield and Gurten (in the German-speaking north, east and central regions); and Moon and Stars (in the Italian south) either avoided the worst of it or made the best of a bad situation, with the result that most could chalk the year up as a success.
But while it is easy to imagine that the Swiss festival market is a paradise of infinite ticket demand, there are fears that business could soon become a little more challenging.
For one thing, June’s Euro 2008 tournament, co-hosted by Switzerland and Austria with matches in Basel, Bern, Zurich and Geneva, will give punters something else to spend their money and attention on this summer.
When Germany hosted the World Cup in 2006, it took a big bite out of the Swiss festival turnout, and though 2007 saw a return to form, a one-two punch of bad weather and a nearby international football tournament could spell bad news for this year.
“If it wasn’t for those two factors, I would be quite confident about our festival and all the others,” says Christof Huber, artistic director of the St. Gallen festival. “Some of them are already selling quite well, even better than last year. If you reach the breakeven situation – and most of the festivals will know that prior to June – that is when you can start to relax a bit.”
OVER-OVERKILL?
Those in the Swiss live industry who don’t make their living from festivals can afford to wonder why so many promoters continue to chance their arm in a packed market which, while historically successful, is perpetually under threat of either saturation or, more literally, wash-out.
“Every year, it is the same shit,” says Stefan Matthey, co-founder of concert promoter Free & Virgin. “We got out of the festival business in 1995 after we did our last Out In The Green festival, when we had Elton John, R.E.M. and Rod Stewart at a three-day event. Our opinion at that time was that we should stop because every field in Switzerland was promoting its own festival, and it is still the same situation today.”
There are festival specialists who are prepared to air their doubts about the future viability of the market as well, including Huber, who combines his job at St. Gallen with the role of general secretary of European festival association Yourope.
“I think the number of festivals, compared to the number of people living in Switzerland and the size of the country, is really extraordinary,” Huber says. “I think that last year, we reached a certain peak, and I don’t think there will be much more progress in terms of numbers of tickets sold or opportunities for new festivals.”
Perhaps the recent ILMC is to blame, but even with the 25th anniversary of his popular Gurtenfestival approaching, promoter Philippe Cornu is another who is full of open-ended questions about the long term future of the business.
“On the public side, there is the same interest [in festivals] as there has always been, maybe even a little stronger; on the business side, there are a lot of discussions taking place about how it will all continue,” he says.
He mentions Live Nation’s Madonna deal, the future possibility of record companies seeking partnerships with promoters and the suggestion that promoters themselves may need to consolidate or merge, and he also recalls the period in the mid-90s when live concert sales slumped in response to the proliferation of dance events.
The sector bounced back as mainstream dance waned and festivals integrated electronic music into their programmes but even with few clouds immediately overhead, Cornu can’t help but keep a look out for indications of trouble on the horizon.
“The concerns now are just to be aware of what we have to do in future; to feel where the market might go, even if it is working fine at the moment,” he says.
A CAUTIOUS OUTLOOK
Running over five days in July, Paléo is by some distance Switzerland’s biggest festival, having launched in 1976 and sold 210,000 tickets a year for the past eight years in a row.
Last year, the stars included Gogol Bordello, Muse, Arcade Fire and the Arctic Monkeys, but all the same, Sébastien Vuignier sounds a note of caution looking forward. “We have not increased ticket prices for several years at Paléo, because we feel we need to be careful,” he says. “I feel we are all at the top of the market and we should be prepared to face a decrease in ticket sales at some point.”
There is some evidence that the tipping point has already been reached. Although the big festival brands enjoyed a prosperous 2007, things were not necessarily so rosy among the local events, of which there are a considerable number.
“There are many, many smaller festivals – every small city in the country has one,” Vuignier says. “Some of them do well, some of them do badly, some have a good year and then a bad one, and the result of this is that some do go bankrupt.”
The past year or so has seen a variety of casualties, and it’s not just recent events that have struggled to find a niche. The organisers of the Bex Rock Festival regretfully wound the event up for good in April 2007 after nine years, having brought acts as diverse as Slipknot, Shaggy and the Levellers to the southwest of Switzerland in recent years.
Le Mont-Soleil Open Air Festival in St. Imier, which admirably aimed to power itself entirely on renewable energy sources, lasted for more than a decade before it gave up the ghost in 2006 after three years of “catastrophic weather” left Mont-Soleil Arts & Spectacles Association (MAS) with an insurmountable budget deficit.
The Vernier Sur Rock Festival, just outside Geneva, welcomed acts such as Placebo, Radiohead and Mano Negra over the course of its 25-year run, but was likewise finally pulled in January after a run of disappointing events.
It is expected to be merged with another retiring local brand, the 22-year-old Swiss World Music Festival and relaunched as the Vernier Festival. The new event, which should run over five days in September will offer a broader musical palette but “no rap”, according to the mayor of the town.
Whether or not these failures represent the tip of the iceberg remains to be seen. If the market in general does begin to contract, the general opinion is that the larger, better differentiated brands will come out on top.
“The offer is so huge during the summer and people are not as rich this year as they were four or five years ago, so people choose the major events,” Vuignier says.
But without the big capacity sites, other events are relying on distinguishing factors to draw a crowd. Rock Oz Arènes is the only festival to take place in a Roman amphitheatre, and according to Laurence Wagner-Engel, it’s been a key factor in the 7,000-capacity festival’s 17 successful years. “A lot of people come for the ambiance,” she says.
In fact, according to Christof Huber, it is increasingly imperative that events develop a distinctive personality for themselves. Too many events, he believes, are guilty of booking incongruously diverse line-ups and replicating each other’s headliners, encouraged by over-zealous booking agents.
“The key thing is: what is the exact profile of your event?” Huber says. “If you don’t get that profile, you have difficulties in selling your tickets. Some of the festivals still struggle with this point, because they are interchangeable.
We’ve built our profile on having as many exclusive acts as possible, with more indie and electronica, rather than the mainstream acts that play all over Switzerland.”
STORIES OF SUCCESS
OpenAir St. Gallen styles itself as “the Swiss equivalent to Glastonbury” and last year brought 30,000 a day to its site in north eastern Switzerland, with a line-up including Arcade Fire, Placebo, Snow Patrol, Kaiser Chiefs and the Arctic Monkeys.
Openair Frauenfeld, which takes place a little further northwest in Thurgau, is another example of a festival that appears to have got it right. Over the years, the event has successively passed through the hands of Free & Virgin (as Out In The Green), Good News and Conti Productions and Event AG, driving Conti and Event AG into bankruptcy. But Frauenfeld this year attracted 105,000 fans over three days with the Prodigy, Sean Paul and Akon among the headliners – a vindication of Pleasure Productions’ reversion to a hip hop theme in 2004. For this year’s event, Jay-Z, Wu Tang Clan and Common will test the formula once again.
“It attracts a young audience, and it is important for young people that they can party there and meet their friends,” says Pleasure Productions’ Andy Locher. “For us, it was very clear that we wanted to go for an urban sound. We started with Cypress Hill and people completely freaked out. In 2005 and 2006 we continued with Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes and Black Eyed Peas on the main stage, and now we are probably the biggest festival in the German part of Switzerland.”
While Frauenfeld has made a virtue of its niche appeal, a virtual festival like AVO Session Basel – which last October brought together artists including Chuck Berry, Rufus Wainwright and Lucinda Williams for a sequence of 13 supper-club-style shows at the 1,530-capacity Messe Basel – has a different philosophy again.
“Nowadays, you don’t launch a festival for a specific age group,” says festival president Matthias Müller. “We try to cover rock, pop, world music, singer-songwriters, some country, some Latin.
“There are a lot of festivals in Switzerland, but what makes Switzerland different is that the people also have the money to buy something special. Concepts like ours can survive much better than they would in any other country.”
Overall, Switzerland’s packed festival calendar thrives in spite of the country’s relatively small population, but the Swiss touring circuit is a little more earthbound. “Switzerland is up and down - I don’t think you could call it steady,” says Good News CEO André Béchir, recent recipient of an Arthur Award for best promoter. “The good shows are doing very well and the medium and smaller shows are harder to sell, but I think it is the same in all the other countries too.”
One unique problem Swiss promoters face is the constant battle to persuade overseas agents that Switzerland consists of three discrete markets defined by language, each having little bearing on the other. However, the general opinion is that the message is beginning to stick.
“In the past two or three years, agents have realised there are different markets,” Cornu says. “It is easily possible to play these three different parts without harming sales in the other ones.”
Much is made of Switzerland’s prosperity, though this alone would not seem to account for its singular appetite for live music. The country’s GDP per capita, while slightly higher than those of France, Germany and the UK, puts it at 13th in the world, behind Austria, Denmark, Norway and the US [source: CIA World Factbook].
Nonetheless, in the words of Michael Drieberg, managing director of Live Music Productions, perhaps the largest promoter in the French-speaking part of the country: “Switzerland has a very strong power to sell tickets. We can do the same show [in Geneva] as a city like Lyon, which is ten times bigger.”
Drieberg has made it his mission to communicate this fact to the international live fraternity. “I am trying to go from one [international] agent to the other and make this point, and it is starting to work,” he says.
PULLING POWER
The problem has always been that while demand may be strong, supply is often less so. Large and small international acts frequently don’t have the time to do justice to Switzerland’s demographic jigsaw puzzle, and consequently Zurich remains the hub of the touring circuit, even if Geneva makes a strong case for itself.
“Zurich is still the main city in Switzerland,” Vuignier says. “It is the biggest one, so when the international acts play only one show in Switzerland, they choose Zurich.”
Until the end of 2010, DEAG-owned Good News has an exclusive arrangement with Zurich’s Hallenstadion. This year it will welcome Mark Knopfler, Bryan Adams, Eric Clapton, Katie Melua, Céline Dion and Kylie Minogue as they swing through Europe.
Of these, only Melua, Dion and Minogue have dates scheduled elsewhere in Switzerland, though Knopfler and Melua were both involved in the latest AVO Session mini-festival of intimate gigs staged in Basel last August.
While a date in Zurich is the perfect way to put an act in front of the country’s German-speaking population, it will make little impression on residents of the French part, who are not generally known to travel all the way to Zurich just for a gig – from Geneva to Zurich, for reference, is a distance of 139 miles.
The festival calendar certainly has an impact on the distribution of artist shows. With the five-day Paléo festival and the 15-night Montreux both taking place in the French-speaking part of Switzerland each July, acts of headlining calibre often choose to drop in on that part of the country in the summer and then hit Zurich on their own tours in the spring or autumn.
But that is not to say that the rest of the country is entirely lacking in big-name shows. Free & Virgin will stage Metallica in front of 20,000 at Degenaupark in Jonschwil in August, as well as Iron Maiden for 9,000 at St Jakobshalle in Basel. Meanwhile, Opus One, Paléo’s sister promotion company, presented James Blunt and Katie Melua at Geneva Arena in early April, co-promoted with regular partner Good News.
At the time of writing, Live Music Production had five shows simultaneously on sale at the 38,000-capacity Stade de Génève – a Swiss record, according to managing director Michael Drieberg. All feature broadly French-language artists – Céline Dion, Tokio Hotel, Mylène Farmer and Johnny Hallyday – and Drieberg says the chances are that French legends Farmer and Hallyday will each add a further show.
Down closer to the grass roots, however, there are other issues. For one thing, the proliferation of small, independent venues in both Zurich and Geneva has led to heightened demand for even the most modestly renowned international acts.
“Ten years ago, you could do a rock show in a club in Zurich or Geneva with any band from Sweden, UK, America, Belgium or France and you would never get less than 100 people,” Vuignier says. “Now there are so many small shows that some of them will only bring in ten people.”
That in turn means fierce competition among local venues. “The fight for new talent is massive,” Huber says. “UK agents are getting six or seven offers from Switzerland for the smallest act you can imagine.”
Quite why live music inspires such passion in this otherwise peaceful, scattered country is a hard question to fathom. But for the sake of both Switzerland’s festival scene and its slowly evolving touring circuit, let’s hope that passion lives on for a while yet.
ADAM WOODS
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IQ Magazine 
