Reeperbahn Twins With C/O Pop

What seems like the battle to be Germany’s major international music business platform has taken another turn, with Hamburg’s Reeperbahn festival and conference making a sort of twinning agreement with Cologne’s C/O Pop.

The arrangement, to be detailed in Groningen, Holland, during Eurosonic-Noorderslag Jan. 15, will have Reeperbahn Festival presenting a showcase during C/O Pop June 23-28. In return, the Cologne event will help with the running of music-related panels in Hamburg Sept. 23-25.

“It may be that we can start a discussion in Cologne in June and then continue it in Hamburg in September,” explained Detlef Schwarte of Inferno Events, one of the organisers behind the Hamburg event.

The idea of the rolling panel may even be extended, with the third leg coming at Iceland Music Export’s You Are In Control conference in Reykjavik Oct. 1-2.

The Hamburg event, which has become a serious rival to Popkomm, looks to be going on a tour of its own. Popkomm canceled its 2009 edition.

Apart from its presentation in Groningen, Germany‘s biggest club festival and its business platform for the creative industries will make another at South By Southwest in Texas March 12-21.

German music trade journalist Manfred Tari, a regular in the Popkomm team who worked on last year’s edition until it was pulled, appears to see the Hamburg event as having a more promising future than the Berlin event, which is set to return in 2010.

Having spent months working on Popkomm when the axe fell, Tari was among the disaffected Popkommites who were furious and decided to put their time in for Hamburg instead.

Tari says he was just happy to have the opportunity to transfer some of the projects he’d been working on in Berlin to the Reeperbahn conference.

Many German music industry observers believe former Popkomm owner Dieter Gorny, now chief exec of the BVMI, the major German music industry organisation, was behind the decision to cancel the event.

Gorny has already said he expects Popkomm 2010 will come up short of being the international event the German music industry merits.

It appears they believe they have the solution to that in Hamburg and Cologne.

At the end of last year there appeared to be as many as five cities trying to stage the country’s benchmark international conference and showcase, the others being Munich and Frankfurt.