Features
Sweden Rocks To Record
The stiff competition at the top end of the Swedish outdoor market doesn’t appear to have affected Sweden Rock as the world-famous metal fest has shifted its four-day tickets in record time.
Photo: Sweden Rock
The arrival of German promoter FKP Scorpio’s Bravalla Festival, which effectively wiped out the Peace & Love Festival that had been the country’s biggest, was once seen as a threat to the 33,000-capacity rock bash on the southern Baltic coast at Solvesborg.
“15,000 four-day tickets sold out one month earlier than normally… so it is a nice record,” festival chief Ingolf Persson told Pollstar.
After last year’s sellout, Persson said he felt the strength of its brand had made his event immune to what’s become a volatile market. It was Sweden Rock’s eighth successive sellout, coming two days after Live Nation took taken a lot of cash out of the heavy metal market by breaking the country’s festival attendance record with a Metallica show at Stockholm Fields that did 51,863.
Persson and his booking team announced in October that wouldn’t be bidding for marquee headliners for the 2015 edition of the festival that’s been running since 1992, preferring to use their budget to strengthen the overall lineup.
Acts confirmed for Sweden Rock June 3-6 include Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Slash, and Toto.