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Scandinavia is a land of festivals and while the sun (occasionally) shines, people are more than willing to make hay. Coupled with robust economies and a healthy live appetite, the good times are back. But are they here to stay?
There is a great deal of optimism in the live music industry in the Nordic region. Business has been growing exponentially for the last ten to fifteen years, ticket revenues are up, there are more festivals than ever, the routing of international acts has become easier and the Scandinavians – all 24.4 million of them – are generally well off. There is also a vibrant domestic music scene, with local acts such as Lordi; Peter Bjorn and John; The Ark; HIM; Big Bang; Sigur Rós; Nightwish; The Rasmus; Mando Diao; and Turbonegro all attaining different degrees of local and international profile.
 Scandinavia is a land of festivals and while the sun (occasionally) shines, people are more than willing to make hay. Coupled with robust economies and a healthy live appetite, the good times are back. But are they here to stay?
There is a great deal of optimism in the live music industry in the Nordic region. Business has been growing exponentially for the last ten to fifteen years, ticket revenues are up, there are more festivals than ever, the routing of international acts has become easier and the Scandinavians – all 24.4 million of them – are generally well off. There is also a vibrant domestic music scene, with local acts such as Lordi; Peter Bjorn and John; The Ark; HIM; Big Bang; Sigur Rós; Nightwish; The Rasmus; Mando Diao; and Turbonegro all attaining different degrees of local and international profile.
While business appears to be booming, however, the live music landscape is in a state of transition and high levels of confidence are being tempered by a healthy dose of caution. Part of that transition has been the arrival of AEG into the territory. The US concert promoter opened an office in Stockholm in September in a bid to break the quasi-monopoly of Live Nation, who own the region’s biggest promoters – EMA Telstar in Sweden, Gunnar Eide in Norway, DKB Motor in Denmark and Welldone in Finland. The move saw long-time Live Nation staffer David Maloney switch camps, along with his assistant Mikael Tillman.
“It’s a local Swedish office for now,” states Maloney, managing director of AEG Live Sweden. “But the next step is to build it up and make it work. We’re moving slowly forward.”
In response to AEG’s presence, EMA Telstar has strengthened its Swedish team with new appointments, and more additions are likely.
“I don’t have anything against the move,” says Tor Nielsen, head of promotion for Live Nation talent at EMA Telstar. “But AEG does have a lot of muscle. We need to work in a different way and it will be interesting.”
Until recently, ICO Concerts was the only real competitor to Live Nation. “You have a strong competitor in AEG, which [EMA Telstar CEO] Thomas Johansson can’t ignore,” comments MD Kim Worsøe. “The future of EMA Telstar is definitely at risk.”
Hove Overtakes the Rest
As an indication of the vibrancy and state of flux of live music in the region, a brand new festival has become Norway’s biggest in its very first year.
Toffen Gunnufsen caused ripples when he quit as head of Norway’s Quart Festival to establish a brand new one, just an hour away up the coast. Those ripples became a wave when Hove (Norway’s first bona fide camping event) became the country’s most popular festival and shifted 53,000 tickets, with 11,000 people a day attending over the five days in June. Live music veteran and former Roskilde director Leif Skov was also instrumental in the launch and Peer Osmundsvaag quit Quart to join Gunnufsen and his team. Gunnufsen is happy with the outcome, but is also cautious about the future.
“The last ten years have seen the market expand,” he says. “There were only five or six festivals a few years ago – now there’s 60 or 70. If you compare the artist fees for 2004 and now, they’ve almost doubled. And the festivals in the regional markets are all trying to get hold of foreign acts.”
So, despite the success of Hove, Gunnufsen is having to re-assess the situation for next year’s event and, with co-organiser and booker Osmundsvaag, will be programming “two or three major headliners for next year instead of five”.
New Gothenburg-based ‘hip’ festival Way Out West (August) was also a triumph, selling out its Slottsparken site after having increased its capacity from 10,000 to 16,000 a day. #
“It was a huge success,” says Ola Broquist of organisers Luger, who also promote Accelerator Festival in June. “Everything ran smoothly.”
Out in the Cold
 With so much competition among festivals and new ones springing up all the time there are, inevitably, losers as well as winners.
While Hove flourished, the Quart Festival – previously Norway’s biggest and taking place just a week after Hove – saw its attendance figures more than halved. And, just as spectacularly, the Hultsfred Festival – Sweden’s largest – lost an estimated $1million (€0.7m) this year.
As a result, four members of staff at festival organisers Rock Party were laid off and director JP Bordahl quit, becoming MD of Gothenburg’s historic venue Storan. As former director of the Malmö Festival and one of the founders of Hultsfred, Per Alexandersson took over as director on 17 September. Despite this year’s shortfall, AEG’s opening gambit is throwing its weight behind the event.
"Hultsfred needs to prove itself and by working together as a new team we’re aiming to reach that target,” comments David Maloney. “It’s a mission for us.”
Alexandersson says: “There were different reasons for the loss –ticket prices, the programming, increased competition...But we’re the first European festival to do an exclusive deal with AEG and that’s good for our self-confidence. I’m looking forward to dealing with them.”
Ticket to Rise?
Coupled with potential over-saturation of the festival market, ticket prices are seen by many in the business as becoming dangerously high. And there are fears that increased competition between Live Nation and AEG will hike ticket prices up even further.
“Ticket prices have definitely reached their peak,” says Risto Juvonen of Finland’s biggest promoter Welldone. “We’re selling normal rock shows for €60-70 a ticket. The Rolling Stones cost over €100, and that’s becoming normal – it’s crazy!”
Toffen Gunuffsen is also worried. “I’m concerned that prices are already ten times higher than other goods on the national price index and we have to be careful,“ he says. “We don’t want to scare fans away.”
Rikke Øxner, music director at Denmark’s Roskilde – Scandinavia’s biggest festival which attracted a 75,000-strong crowd this year – says escalating ticket prices are due to high artist guarantees and increased local competition.
“Over the last few years, artists’ fees have increased immensely,” she says. “One reason for this is decreasing album sales. But it’s also because a lot of new local business people in Denmark are doing big shows in places other than Copenhagen.”
But, in the final outcome, most within the business say the only way to pay those artist guarantees is to put ticket prices up. “The only ones that can pay for high fees are the punters,” says Flemming Schmidt at Denmark’s biggest promoter DKB Motor. “They determine prices at the end of the day and whether they are too much.”
As far as ticketing goes, Ticketmaster moved into the region in 2001 and has since taken over the main agencies: BILLETnet in Denmark, Billettservice in Norway, Ticnet in Sweden and Lippupalvelu in Finland. But there is competition from rival ticket agencies. For example, Ola Bronquist at Luger is now working with independent agency Tickster for its Arvika festival.
“There has always been new ticketing companies emerging,“ counters Kjell Arne Orseth, MD at Norway’s Billettservice. “We do have a strong belief in our products and our systems.” 
Touring Made Simple
The number of high profile acts that pass through the territory is testament to the ease of touring in the Nordic region, and while each country has its own characteristics, collaboration between them is close. One of the key challenges to touring are the prohibitive distances between major cities, especially in Norway, which despite having a population of just 4.5m, is the fifth largest country in Europe.
Perhaps as a result, top international acts generally play only one big show in each country, possibly two in Sweden. In July, Metallica played Stockholm Olympic Stadium (35,000), Oslo’s Vallehovin Stadium (40,000), Helsinki Olympic Stadium (40,000) and an outdoor concert at Århus (50,000) in Denmark. All sold out in less than three hours and were booked seamlessly through the Live Nation/EMA Telstar subsidiaries in the region.
“It’s easy to route acts around the Nordic territory because we all work closely together in Sweden, Denmark and Norway,” says Rune Lem at Norway’s main promoter Gunnar Eide.
In Finland, the country’s geography has been to its advantage with routing made easier through the opening up of the Baltic markets. “Routing used to be a problem because Finland was either the first or last day of the tour,” says Risto Juvonen. “But bands now are playing Russia, and Finland has become the stop in between. That’s going to be the trend in the future.”
Juvonen says Welldone sold over half a million tickets from May to the end of August this year, producing a turnover of €42m. Juhani Merimaa organises Finland’s biggest rock festival Ruisrock, which attracted 65,000 visitors in July this year.
“One reason Finland is doing well is the opening up of the Baltic markets,” he confirms. “It’s close to Finland, they have a lot of money from oil and the people like the same kind of music.”
Domestic Bliss
Life is good in Denmark too, with Live Nation-owned DKB Motor promoting gigs over the past year by Roger Waters, Steely Dan, Aerosmith, Genesis and the Rolling Stones (50,000 at the Odense Stadium) and selling almost half a million tickets in the process.
“That’s great,” Flemming Schmidt says, adding: “But I’m not so sure it will continue.”
Looking to the future, the company is tapping into the lucrative local market by taking on Anders Wahren, who was previously part of the Roskilde booking team, and signing up some new Danish bands with more signings to come. As well as booking more domestic acts, DKB has moved into promoting musicals and recently staged Mamma Mia, selling out 16 shows.
“The musicals that people will travel to London and New York to see, we bring them here in the original language,” Schmidt says.
Revenues in Sweden are also healthy, and this year EMA Telstar promoted stadium shows by U2, Bruce Springsteen, Iron Maiden, Robbie Williams and the Rolling Stones, all at the Ullevi Stadium in Gothenburg, attracting around 60,000 people to each.
 Winter Blues
However, the short Nordic summer (May-August), when all the main festivals take place, does have a knock-on effect for the concert business during the rest of the year.
“We don’t have many people buying tickets in the autumn, as all the money was spent in the summer,” says Tomi Lindblom at Finnish promoter Eastway, which accounts for around half of the country’s market capacity. “We have some big names coming in the winter, but all the really big stars were here in the summer.”
However, Norway in particular boasts a number of music associations which help promote the local scene, and some of the country’s oil revenues also find their way into rock and pop. Indeed, the Nordic business in general has a good relationship with both national and local government.
There are other benefits too: Artist tax is absent from tour reconciliation in Denmark, and runs at the manageable rate of 15% in Sweden, Norway and Finland. Meanwhile, it became illegal to sell tickets above their face value in Norway on 1 June this year. It’s been illegal in Denmark for a couple of years. The main concerns about the health of the industry are voiced about sound limits, which were recently introduced, capping the level to an average of 100dB.
“You can only play around 100dB in venues and at festivals, which is very low,” says Sweden-based Kalle Metz of The Agency Group. “The decibel levels also restrict the lower age limit of the concerts to 13.”
Size Matters
In terms of live music venues, the region is fairly well catered for, although the consensus is that there is a lack of 2,000-4,000 capacity venues in Sweden, Finland and Norway. Leif ‘Blixten’ Henriksson worked at EMA Telstar Sweden before setting up his own domestic promotion company Blixten last year, taking a number of staff and artists with him.
“There is a lack of a new, modern, theatre-type of arena with an indoor capacity of around 3,000 to 5,000 in Sweden,” he says.
Peer Osmundsvaag, MD of the Atomic Agency and co-director of Hove Festival, says there’s a similar situation in Norway. “There’s a good spread in Norway – from student venues to sports halls to arenas,” he says. “But Oslo is missing a 3,000 to 4,000 capacity venue. We’ve got Rockefeller [1,350] and Sentrum [1,800] and then there’s a gap between that and Spektrum [10,000].”
Oslo’s Spektrum has installed drapes at a cost of around £500,000 (€714,000) in order to be able to transform the venue into a smaller space that can cater for as few as 3,000 people.
“We’ve also put in new lighting to make it into more of a music venue than it ever was,” says general manager Wiggo Schie. In Finland there are similar concerns over a lack of mid-sized venues. “Hartwall Arena [12,000] is the main arena,” says Juvonen at Welldone. “Every city has an ice arena of around 5,000 to 8,000-capacity. But there’s a big problem with capacities of 2,000 to 3,000.”
Although boasting a good range of venues, Denmark is in need of a new arena-sized venue, although plans may already be afoot.
“In Copenhagen, there’s no decent arena,” says EMA Telstar’s Tor Nielsen. “The Forum is old and they need something new – but it may happen.”
Meanwhile, Denmark’s national football stadium Parken (52,000) is currently undergoing major work, which will see its oldest stand torn down and replaced, ready for 2009. Major events production company Zig Zag Productions has its office within the Parken complex and produced the recent Justin Timberlake show which pulled in a 52,000 capacity crowd, making it the biggest on his world tour.
“The new stand will incorporate technical facilities to improve staging live music in the stadium,” says Zig Zag MD Paddy Gythfeldt. 
The Final Countdown
The Nordic region is generally basking in its most lucrative period ever for live music. Alongside by:Larm (21-23 February 2008) in Norway, industry events Music & Media in Finland and Airwaves in Iceland (both in October) help to raise the profile of live music in the region and abroad.
But there are challenges lurking just around the corner and the industry is trying to find ways to tackle them. In terms of festivals and the perceived saturation of the market, niche events are becoming more popular.
Gunnar Eide’s Oslo-based boutique festival Norwegian Wood did well this June, attracting 21,000 people over four days. And Norway-based promoter Bureau Storm, who organise by:Larm, promoted the Træna Festival in July, set on the 15 square kilometre Træna Island with its population of just 381. However, Luger’s Broquist believes that it’s not so much about niche festivals, but about reasonable pricing and intelligent programming.
“The key is to get the price right for what you’re selling,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be niche. You just have to know your audience and put the programme together right. I think there’s room and need for one or two more major festivals in Scandinavia, and I think we’ll see smaller events with a very certain type of audience at each event.”
And is the arrival of AEG a threat, a challenge or a cause for celebration?
“Let the most creative team win,” says DKB’s Schmidt. “If they can keep me awake, that’s good.” LEX HUNTER
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