Koopmans’ Secret Sellout

German-based festival promoter Folkert Koopmans can’t be that miffed that his effort to resurrect Sweden’s Hultsfred Festival is showing a downside, as he’s seeing upside everywhere else.

Best Kept Secret, the new festival Koopmans produces with local Dutch promoter Friendly Fire on the event site at Beekse Bergen, sold out its 15,000 capacity June 21-23.

A week earlier, Koopmans’ Indian Summer Festival, the other Dutch event he runs with Friendly Fire, did 32,000 per day.
Over the same weekend, Northside – the Danish fest he does with Brian Nielsen of Skandinavian – sold out its 25,000-capacity site at Århus, while Rammstein helped pulled 27,000 per day to Greenfield Festival, the Swiss festival Koopmans runs with Thomas Durr’s Act Entertainment.

Back home, the Hamburg-based promoter’s Hurricane and Southside festivals, FKP Scorpio’s flagship German events, sold out 130,000 tickets between them.

The success of Best Kept Secret and Indian Summer means that this year FKP has sold nearly 50,000 festival tickets in The Netherlands.

The main sufferer appears to have been Pinkpop, where festival chief Jan Smeets felt the drop in the number of day tickets sold was due to not having a headliner that could sell the 30,000 days tickets that Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band shifted in 2012.

Earlier in the year, Smeets had been on Dutch radio warning that the country’s festival market was becoming overcrowded, although he later said he doesn’t believe Pinkpop’s failure to sell so many day tickets was because of increased competition.

The Best Kept Secret lineup included Arctic Monkeys, Sigur Ros, Alt-J, Damien Rice, Portishead, and Two Door Cinema Club.