Festival-Sized See Rock

The organisers of Austria’s See Rock concert series are to squeeze it down to a four-day event in a bid to pull more punters from neighbouring regions.

The 2011 event stretched from June 3 to Aug. 6, making it one of the longest concert series-style festivals in Europe, selling 55,000 of the 60,000 tickets that promoter Richard Hoermann had targeted.

The headliners included Sting, Shakira, Joe Cocker, Roxette, James Blunt and Bryan Adams. Now, Hoermann and his working partners at Nova Rock believe the event will attract more visitors from Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary if they can squeeze it into four days.

The See Rock Festival, which is scheduled June 29-30, will feature classic rock acts. There will be a one-dayer called Lake Fest for electronic acts and DJs Aug. 25, plus another for pop acts.

The pop day hasn’t been named or scheduled but is expected to be in the first two weeks of June.

Hoermann chose the See Rock site at Graz, a 56-acre former gravel-mining area that was turned into parkland in 1984, because it’s within a two-hour dive of Ljubljana, Budapest, Zagreb and Vienna.

Having first used it 10 years ago for a rock show with Toto and Status Quo, and more recently for an Elton John concert, Hoermann was also aware of its potential to be configured for any crowd size ranging from 10,000 to 60,000.

“In 2012 we want to reach the same number of people as in 2011, but do it over a four-day period. That’s the goal,” he told Pollstar, saying he hoped to confirm the first names by the end of November.