HUNGARY: Balaton Sound has announced the return of its Safety First initiative, which launched last year to help young people become more conscious and secure at the festival. Safety First’s expert team educates young people on problems that might arise during the festival, such as issues with mental health or complications arising from drug and alcohol use. With dedicated volunteers onsite to make sure that Balaton Sound is a safe place for all festivalgoers, the 2019 festival will aim to involve the international audience in the initiative this year. Balaton Sound will welcome Armin van Buuren, Tiesto, Marshmello, DJ Snake,…
Author: Festival Insights
UK: Sound City has announced that its conference component, Sound City+, will return to Liverpool from May 3 – 5. Taking place across the entire festival weekend, the programme promises to offer insight into the most pertinent issues and debates within the music industry. The award-winning conference will offer a chance for musicians, industry professionals and anyone with an interest in the music business to witness a diverse range of panel discussions and interviews. Sound City+ also gives attendees the chance to speak in person with the industry’s key players in unique one-to-one sessions. As a Keychange festival and conference,…
SPAIN: International Music Summit (IMS) – the platform for business, culture and education in global electronic music – has partnered with the leading female empowerment organisation in the music industry, shesaid.so. As the summit continues to identify areas where positive transformation can occur, encouraging debate and proactively working towards change, this year’s event at the Hard Rock Hotel in Ibiza from May 22 – 24 will be presented and co-curated by the shesaid.so organisation, with a 50% discount offered to all shesaid.so members who are attending the summit for the first time. Key objectives of this partnership are to break…
UK: A Greener Festival has announced that it will host the first ever International AGF Awards at the upcoming Green Events & Innovations Conference, which kickstarts the International Live Music Conference on March 5 in London. The new awards night aims to highlight a single best-in-class event for its sustainability efforts, across 11 categories. AGF co-founder, Claire O’Neill, said: “The significance of the International Greener Festival Awards is that for the first time we are crowning the top winner as the greenest festival in the world. We also shout about the festivals with the best transport, waste, power and those…
UK: Over 60,000 tulips are set to bloom at Arundel Castle in West Sussex in mid-April, when the annual Tulip Festival will see the extensive gardens decorated with swathes of the colourful flowers for three weeks. A record number of over 130 varieties of tulip will make up the display, including the mandarin-scented Ballerina, the deep maroon Queen of the Night and the playfully striped Marilyn. “We have a number of unusual and exciting tulips at Arundel Castle this year,” said Head Gardener Martin Duncan. “Keep an eye out for the deep crimson, fringed Valery Gergiev. It’s a fantastic, slightly…
UK: Crowd Connected, the developer of mobile location software, is accelerating the growth of its international footprint through a range of new partnerships. Crowd Connected’s cloud-based location tracking solution, Colocator, has been rapidly adopted by leading visitor businesses worldwide. Through a simple code plug-in, Colocator runs in the background of an event or venue’s official app, accurately tracking the location of visitors’ mobile phones. By processing and visualising this stream of location data, Colocator provides a complete toolset to understand and influence people’s movements in realtime. Crowd Connected’s expanding network of partners promises to bring Colocator to new markets and…
Andy Grimsey is a Partner at the licensing law firm, Poppleston Allen, and since 2004 has acted on behalf of major breweries, late night operators, restaurant chains, developers, and large independents – including festivals. Festivals, like many other licensed premises, continue to ride the storm of increasing bureaucracy and legal requirements. Here are a few of the main developments in the last couple of years that may affect you, your staff and customers. THE LICENSING ACT 2003 If you have a premises licence or host your event under a Temporary Event Notice (TEN), you may know that the Statutory Guidance…
UK: Victorious Festival has been awarded a Silver distinction on Attitude is Everything’s Charter of Best Practice for its commitment to being accessible to deaf and disabled music fans. “It has been an absolute pleasure to support Victorious to achieve Silver on our Charter of Best Practice,” said Paul Hawkins, AIE’s Festivals and Volunteering Manager. “We’ve been really impressed how the festival have engaged as a whole staff team, including undertaking Disability Equality Training and being responsive to customer feedback. Their dedicated access team have worked hard to make the festival as accessible as possible and we look forward to…
UK: Following the reveal of its 10th anniversary line-up, Parklife has launched a brand new reward scheme called ‘Parklife Perks’, which is available to all 2019 ticket holders. As part of the festival’s core principle to provide value for money for its customers, it will now be rewarding festivalgoers for the purchase of their Parklife 2019 tickets with a 20%-off ASOS code, and free access to the Parklife club series – featuring performances from various special guest artists in the run-up to the festival. Renowned for hosting a huge range of global headliners year-on-year – with the likes of Liam…
UK: ID&C, the UK-based provider of wristbands and lanyards, is now selling eco-friendly wristbands in response to an increasing demand from customers. The bands are made out of recycled plastic bottles, which offer a greener alternative to standard wristbands. According to industry estimates, roughly 23,000 tons of waste is produced at UK music festivals each year but only a third is recycled. Last year, 61 independent music gatherings signed a three-year pledge to get ‘Drastic on Plastic’, promising to rid their sites of single-use plastic by 2021. The eco bands come with duplicate print on both sides and a bamboo…