Korean Festivals Inching Up

Some of the international acts also performed at Taiwan’s Formoz Festival, which took place the same weekend in Taipei.

It was the first time in five years that Formoz was staged after a successful run of annual weekend festivals that started in 2001.

“We just needed to reorganize,” The Wall Music CEO Orbis Fu told the Taipei Times. “Our staff was maxed out, the venue was not really big enough, and we were having to deal with all kinds of expectations about what local fans thought the festival should be.” The Wall Music, which puts on the festival, also runs concert venues in Taipei, Greater Kaohsiung and Yilan. Fu added that when the festival went on hiatus he only expected it to last “for a year or two, but it just dragged on for this long.”

The Taipei Times conjectures that the timeout was inevitable. Formoz was forced to compete with more and more Asian rock festivals taking place at the same time and attracting larger crowds. At its height, Formoz drew 10,000 people, which is about one-tenth of the crowd size at Fuji Rock and Summer Sonic in Japan, and one-sixth of the number that attends South Korea’s Ansan Valley Rock Festival.

But Fu says that in the past five years the number of international acts being drawn to Taiwan has grown enormously.

His own clubs could see at most two foreign acts per month five years ago, and now he can present “half a dozen.” More music fans, he notes, have become interested in international indie acts.

This year’s festival drew 12,000 people per day and had a budget of about NT$71 million ($2.4 million).

One reason for the boost in attendance was a change of venue. In 2008, the festival used the Taipei Children’s Recreation Center, an amusement park.

This year, the same site was used but expanded to include adjacent parks to the west and south attached to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which were developed for the Taipei International Flora Exposition in 2010. When the exposition pavilions were being built the local government would not let any other organizers use the area, including Fu’s. “Before we had to go to the government and beg,” he told Taipei Times. “Now, there is a mandate. We might as well take advantage of it.”