2025 Impact Intl. UK/Euro Honoree: Oliver Hoppe

OLIVER HOPPE
Managing Director
Wizard Live

HOWEVER GOOD OR BAD YOUR NIGHT WAS, GET UP & GET ON

German promoter Wizard Live had a stellar 2025 with highlights including the 60th anniversary homecoming show of Scorpions and the German dates of Iron Maiden’s “Run For Your Lives” 50th anniversary world tour. The company is also doing great with domestic acts like Nena, who has some 50 mostly sold-out shows lined up for next year, and Böhse Onkelz, which will embark on a 17-date arena run in November, following a sold-out open-air tour in 2024.

The reason Böhse Onkelz has become one of Germany’s most successful domestic touring acts is partly due to Wizard Live Managing Director Oliver Hoppe. When the band decided to come back in 2014, most promoters wouldn’t have touched the eccentric group with a 10-foot pole. Germany’s media had branded them as far-right extremists, and large parts of the public ran with this false narrative.

Thankfully, Hoppe has thick skin. He’s eloquent, thinks logically and boasts a no-bullshit demeanor without coming across as unemotional. He doesn’t buy into the mythology of music industry romanticism so common in older generations that pioneered this business.
Hoppe says he falls “in and out of love with live music several times over the course of a year,” but remembers “one instance that really stuck with me. During the reunion of Böhse Onkelz in 2014, the team did a documentary collecting voices from fans on what the reunion meant to them. They told the most emotional stories of sickness, divorce, death, and everything in between, and how the band carried them through their darkest days, and that being able to see them live again gave them a new lease on life. I found that very inspiring.”

Approaching 15 years in the biz, Hoppe has weathered many a storm, but “This too shall pass. In my decades in the industry, I’ve seen and was part of stellar successes as well as catastrophic failures. You are not a greater or worse human being with either and both success and failure don’t last forever. So however good or bad your night was, get up and get on the next morning.”