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Roskilde Reshuffles Booking Team
Roskilde Festival is reshaping its organization, giving more responsibility to the program director, and appointing a new head of music booking. Volunteers, the heart and soul of Roskilde, will play an increased role in the festival’s programming going forward.
Anders Wahrén, who has been a booker at Roskilde Festival since 2003, and program director since 2014, will continue to have the overall responsibility for the artistic profile at Roskilde Festival, including music, art, and activism, but he will not be booking acts for future line-ups.
Going forward, he will have a sharpened focus on strategy, management, and development of the organization behind Roskilde Festival, and will be responsible for the festival’s extensive production team.
Said Wahrén, “it is absolutely essential that we continue to push the limits and develop Roskilde Festival in new directions. That is why we are now changing how we put together our music programme. Partly in the distribution of roles in the booking team, but we are also in the process of rethinking how we can involve volunteers even more in programming in the future.
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“Our programming must be in constant development, so that Roskilde Festival stays relevant and keeps up with time. Therefore, it is necessary to move around the roles occasionally, and I can support the work better when I can also relate to our surrounding world and the festival landscape in general.”
Thomas Jepsen will be the new head of music booking at Roskilde Festival. Jepsen has been associated with the booking team since 2009, first as a volunteer and from 2014 as booker. Jepsen is the man responsible for booking the big, international artists at recent Roskilde editions. He’ll continue to be responsible for bringing the hottest names as well as new artistic waves to Roskilde Festival in the future with the rest of the team.
Said Jepsen, “I would like to build on the work we are already doing, where our focus is especially on young people’s communities. We want to continue to pique people’s curiosity and give them something more than what they necessarily have on their wish list.
“At the same time, we must ensure diversity in the music programme. In recent years, there has been a necessary, increased focus on the gender distribution on the festival line-ups, we will also in the future pay even more attention to the representation of minorities in our programming.”
Roskilde Festival’s foundation rests on voluntary engagement. Therefore, the new organization also has a focus on involving even more volunteers in the booking team and on developing new ways in which they can engage.
Said Wahrén, “We have a goal of reaching all corners of the musical trends, and the risk of hitting blind spots is minimized if we expand the group. Therefore, we are now investigating other ways to volunteer. It could, for example, be as a scout, where you go to concerts and report back to us. It could also be on a more organisational level. We are developing that.”