Oya Untroubled At No. 1

While a couple of Norway’s bigger outdoors have tottered in and out of bankruptcy, Oslo’s Oya continues to avoid financial problems and is now Norway’s biggest festival.

This year’s event sold out all four days on the 25,000-capacity outdoor site at the city’s Medieval Park. That puts it ahead of Hove Festival, which the U.K.’s Festival Republic appears to be successfully reinventing 160 miles down the coast at Arendal.

The first day of Oya, when about 100 acts play across 30 Oslo club venues, pulled another 7,000.

Quart Festival, which for the last three years has been vying against Oya and Hove to be the country’s biggest festival, looks in more trouble after allegedly dropping a further 10 million kroner ($1.56 million) in 2009. Like Hove, Quart has also just been bought out of bankruptcy.

New owners Arild Buli and Trond Age Nyhus have said they’re committed to staging the event in 2010, but that was before Norwegian newspapers discovered the losses may be much higher and it may not be possible to underwrite a similar downside next year.

Oya chief Claes Olsen said he thinks his festival has avoided the problems that hit Hove and Quart, which had very similar crowd sizes, because it’s kept a close watch on its outgoings.

He said it will make a good profit again this year, despite the extra costs caused by the Norwegian kroner falling in value against the euro.

Olsen said he’s not so concerned about Oya being the biggest festival in Norway as he is about it being the best. The response this year’s event got from the Oslo and national papers suggests he might have already done that.

The acts keeping Oya top of the tree Aug. 11-16 included Arctic Monkeys, Madness, Lily Allen, Röyksopp, Vampire Weekend, Rise Against, Wilco and Glasvegas.