SBSR Sells Out For First Time

Musica No Coracao’s decision to move its Super Bock Super Rock Festival to the coast is paying off, as this year the Portuguese festival recorded its first sellout.

Last year it moved to a new beach site at Maco and attracted about 26,000 fans per day. This year’s event July 14-16 sold all 35,000 tickets in advance.

Up until 2008 Super Bock Super Rock, a twinned event staged in Lisbon and Porto, had been on a low. That year it only did about 13,000 per day at each site and Portuguese daily Público called it “the festival that didn’t exist.”

The following year Depeche Mode’s late but unavoidable cancellation had two-thirds of the audience wanting refunds, which meant the crowd size was about the same as in 2008.

The festival started in 1994 and has changed site at least a half-dozen times, but it looks unlikely that Musica will want to move from the beach at Maco before its deal runs out in 2020.

The acts helping to make Super Bock rock included Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, Brandon Flowers, Portishead, The Strokes and Elbow.