Peace & Love Bigger Than Rock

Once again it was a close-run thing but Swedish festivalgoers narrowly preferred Love & Peace to Rock as the country’s two most popular outdoors battled to be its No. 1 crowd-puller.

After Sweden Rock sold out  its 35,000-capacity across all four days June 9-12, Love & Peace narrowly beat its own records
by selling 42,000 tickets over its three days July 1-3 in Borlänge. Last year it sold 41,685 tickets.

Fans snapped up more than 30,000 three-day tickets to this year’s Love & Peace.

“We haven’t finished working out the numbers but at the moment everything tells us that we’ll have a very positive economic result,” Mattsson told Pollstar, after the Swedish media went into raptures over how the country’s festival crowd record had been beaten.

Mattson put the record-breaking down to all the right factors falling into place at the right time.

Peace & Love started in 1999 with the concept of spreading the message of diversity, solidarity and understanding. Apart from its name, it appears to have something of an almost hippie ethos aimed at crossing borders and bringing differing cultures together. Within 10 years, the Swedes really got the vibe and it was out-selling the other big outdoors.

This year’s lineup included Jay-Z, Lily Allen, Patti Smith, Alice In Chains, Them Crooked Vultures and Vampire Weekend.
Down south in Solvesborg, Sweden Rock chief Ingolf Per-sson was less disappointed about being beaten as he was pleased that a designated rock fest could come so close to being No. 1.

The acts keeping his event in the frame included Guns N’ Roses, Aerosmith, Slayer, Gary Moore, WASP and Billy Idol.