Features
Lieberberg To Keynote UK Festivals
The UK Festival Conference has opted to fly in a German promoter for insight into the future of festivals.
“I’m both astonished and flattered to be the keynote speaker,” said Frankfurt-based promoter Marek Lieberberg, following the announcement that he’ll be one of the main draws at this year’s UK Festival Conference at London’s
The promoter gets down with Germany's Die Toten Hosen at Rock Am Ring in 2005.
“If I don’t forget to remember to forget I will try to share moments of bliss, delusion, vanity and furore with you,” he said.
Lieberberg waschosen for his track record for producing major German festivals including Rock Am Ring, Rock Im Park, Rock Im Pott and Rock ’n’ Heim, the latter in cahoots with Live Nation.
The UK Festival Conference says “artist fees” and “new technology” will be key themes at this year’s gathering.
The conference’s apparently trendy move is to keep things moving by adopting the fast-paced “Pecha Kucha-style session” to discuss “the explosion of new technology in the modern festival infrastructure.”
The “Pecha Kucha-style presentation involves showing 20 slides for 20 seconds each, which is supposed to produce concise and fast-paced presentations at multi-speaker events.
Also on the agenda is a panel called “Globalisation Invasion,” or the risks British festivals face as more UK youngsters become festival tourists.
Another session will ask: “Are artist fees killing festivals?”
The UK Festival Conference will be followed by the UK Festival Awards, which has prizes for 20 categories.