Ruisrock Makes A Little More Room

Juhani Merimaa has reconfigured the Ruisrock Festival finnish site and made a little more room for the audience but doesn’t expect to be selling out the new 29,000 capacity.

"We’ll obviously be very happy if we do sell out, but I expect it will be like most other years when one or two of the three days will attract 25,000 people," Merimaa told Pollstar.

The Finnish festival will no longer have Puistolava, one of its four regular stages, which will be replaced by a new 10,000-capacity tent stage.

Merimaa is running the event for the seventh time. He took over in 2001 when the city of Turku, which had supported the festival for 31 years, looked at losses of more than 4 million Finn Marks (then close to a US$1 million) and decided it was time to hand over to a private promoter.

Since then, Merimaa, who has owned and run Helsinki’s Tavastia Club for more than 25 years, has steadied the ship.

In the six years he’s been in charge, the event has regularly sold out the Saturday and very often one of the other two days as well.

Last year, the annual gathering on the southwest coast – the Buzz Aldrin of music festivals in the sense that it’s the world’s second oldest behind Holland’s Pinkpop – pulled 65,000 across three days.

The lineup for this year’s July 6-8 event, which is the usual equal mix of international and top Scandinavian talent, was announced at an April 17th press conference at Turku’s Hotel Marina Palace.

It includes The Flaming Lips, The Hives, Billy Talent, Sahara Hotnights, The Rasmus, Mando Diao, Marillion, Stone Sour, The Magic Numbers, Leningrad, Gogol Bordello, The Pipettes, The Crash, Mastodon, Disco Ensemble, and Juliette & The Licks.