Eurosonic Goes In 15 Minutes

Tickets for January’s Eurosonic and Noorderslag showcase festivals sold out in 15 minutes.

The Nov. 24 onsale was for the 15,000 tickets available to the public, while 3,150 are held back to cover the potential demand from conference delegates. Last year they all went in advance.

The Dutch gathering, which has become the epicenter of the European festival business, has already sold more tickets than it had at the same stage last year.

The first day of the Eurosonic-Noorderslag weekend has the European Festival Awards at the Oosterport Congress Centre in Groningen Jan. 9. This year’s awards attracted 1 million public votes.

Several previous winners including Serbia’s Exit Festival, Heineken Open’er Festival in Poland and Hungary’s Sziget Festival are up for the best European festival gong.

The opening day also has the European Border Breaker Awards, which are given in recognition of the success certain acts have achieved outside their own country.

The winners will receive awards during a televised ceremony hosted by UK TV personality and musician Jools Holland.
The winners are Estonia’s Ewert & The Two Dragons, Nabiha from Denmark, French Films (Finland), C2C (France), Emeli Sandé (UK), Of Monsters and Men (Iceland), Dope D.O.D. (The Netherlands), Amor Electro (Portugal), Juan Zelada (Spain) and Niki and the Dove (Sweden).

The daytime conference programme will include a keynote interview with Beggars Banquet founder Martin Mills, a high-profile champion of the indie cause.

Apart from speaking out against the Universal-EMI deal, Mills was instrumental in setting up the UK’s Association of Independent Music in 1999, and subsequently co-founded IMPALA in 2000, A2IM in the USA and most recently the Worldwide Independent Network. 

What’s possibly an ironic topic for a gathering that ran on a shoestring while trying to win some European Union funding, the conference will provide two top EU cultural execs a platform to explain how the economic budget has been allocated and how it will be invested in the future.

Finnish education and culture minister Jarmo Lindén will also have a session to explain how his country has become a major exporter of talent.

Eurosonic-Noorderslag is at Groningen, The Netherlands, Jan. 9-12.