Balaton Traces Sziget’s Route

The team behind Hungary’s Sziget Festival appears to have grown its younger Balaton Sound to the point where it can regularly pull at least 20,000.

It’s still not a major crowd, even among old Eastern Bloc festival standards, but Sziget began as a low-key gathering organised by a group of Budapest students.

When Balaton Sound started in 2007 it had about 8,000 per day, so the mainly electronic festival has grown to nearly three times that size in six years.

The following year it was one of the smaller makeweights in a $30 million package when Sziget Cultural Management Ltd sold its festival business – which also included Volt Festival and Romania’s Félsziget Festival – to telecoms giant Econet.hu Media.

In that summer Balaton Sound, which is on the shores of Lake Balaton, central Europe’s largest inland waterway, more than doubled its daily crowd to around 18,000.

The growth has since been steady but this year’s gathering pulled 108,000 over five days, comfortably beating last year’s record-breaking crowd of 101,500.

It also produced Balaton’s best daily attendance, when the Saturday bill headed by German electro star Paul Kalkbrenner drew 28,000 people.

The acts helping Balaton Sound on the way up July 12-15 included David Guetta, Tinie Tempah, Animal Collective, Armin Van Buuren, Calvin Harris, De La Soul, Carl Cox and Knife Party.