Reeperbahn Festival Germany Receives $32m In Government Funding For The Next Five Years

The budget committee of the German Bundestag, the country’s federal parliament, has granted €27.85 million ($32.2 million) of cultural funding to Reeperbahn Festival, which celebrates its 13th edition in 2018, Sept. 19-22.

Lisa Meinen – Reeperbahn Festival 2017
Liam Gallagher was last year’s star guest. He performed at Hamburg’s Docks Club.

The talent festival and music conference has thereby received more than half of the total cultural budget that was allocated for the city of Hamburg (€49 million). The money has to last for the next five years. 

Hamburg politicians Rüdiger Kruse (CDU, Germany’s conservative democratic party) and Johannes Kahrs (SPD, social democrats) were responsible for convincing the budget committee to grant the money. They said the money was intended to develop Reeperbahn Festival into “the leading platform for music, music economy and digital economy in Europe.”

The money will be used to increase the events public perception domestically and internationally. One big part in that is the festival’s annual New York edition in conjunction with A2IM Indie Week: for the third time, June 18-23, Reeperbahn Festival staged a mini-version of the Hamburg original in the Big Apple, complete with a showcase night featuring international up and coming artists.

Other projects currently pushed by Reeperbahn Festival that will benefit from the funding include “Keychange,” a campaign promoting gender diversity in music, and “Wunderkinder,” an initiative that puts international talent buyers in touch with German acts.

Festival CEO Alexander Schulz told Musikwoche the money would also be invested in a media-effective opening event for Reeperbahn Festival, different conference formats designed to bring the music business and other relevant economies closer together, as well as other international spin-off events such as the one in New York.

– Reeperbahn Festival New York Edition
The festival took over Pianos on Lower East Side to present up-and-coming artists from all over the world