Lowlands On A High

It sold out its 55,000-capacity within eight days of going on sale in February and Lowlands Festival chief Eric van Eerdenburg was pleased to report a stress-free lead-up to the Dutch event.

He was hardly biting his fingernails last year when it took only 10 weeks to sell out, but this year the tickets were gone before any acts were announced.

“I think it’s a great tribute from our fans and I think next year we must be prepared to sell out even more quickly,” van Eerdenburg told Pollstar, explaining that particular operation also means making sure tickets end up in the right hands.

“This year I think the speed of the sellout took the secondary market by surprise,” he said. “The number of tickets that were invalidated because they’d been traced to known touts was down from over 700 to somewhere under 500.”

Live Nation-owned Mojo Concerts monitors credit card transactions with the card numbers previously used by known touts. It cancels any tickets found to have been sold to them. The tickets are then returned to the market at face value.

“The secondary sellers know we’re out to get them,” van Eerdenburg explained, while admitting that monitoring and checking the sale of 55,000 tickets is “a pain in the arse.”

He did at least have an incident-free event and the predicted rainy weather turned out to be no more than an isolated shower on the final day.

The acts keeping Lowlands on a high Aug. 20-22 included Massive Attack, Placebo, Snow Patrol, Pendulum, Gentleman & The Revolution, The Gaslight Anthem, Queens of the Stone Age, Imelda May, Mumford & Sons, and The Kooks.