A family affair: Dugi Lipa on growing Sunny Hill Festival

Dugi Lipa has spoken to IQ about the rapid growth of his family-run festival in Kosovo, Sunny Hill.

The Prishtina native founded the international festival in his hometown in 2018, featuring a bill topped by his daughter, pop sensation Dua Lipa.

“It’s a family affair and I could not be prouder,” says Dugi, who also manages Dua and runs his own communications agency in the Kosovo capital.

“I contract the artists and use our private network while Dua promotes the hell out of the festival – she’s here every year for all four days. This year, my son [Gjin] was really hands-on with booking the opening acts and the US artists. My daughter Rina has been working at the festival since she was 17 – she does an amazing job with hospitality for the artists. And my wife [Anesa] is in charge of the look and feel of the festival and the artist village.”

In the past five years, Sunny Hill has brought stars including Miley Cyrus, J Balvin and Calvin Harris to Prishtina, putting Kosovo on the live music map.

“With this lineup, I think that we are competing with some of the major festivals in Europe”

The fourth instalment took place last week (25–28 July), with another blockbuster lineup featuring Bebe Rexha, Stormzy, Burna Boy, The Blaze, DJ Snake, Black Coffee, The Martinez Brothers and Groove Armada.

“With this lineup, I think that we are competing with some of the major festivals in Europe. We are very proud of it,” Dugi tells IQ.

This year’s edition, which took place at a new site, drew 35,000 people each day and set a new attendance record in Kosovo.

“I can’t express enough the pure joy it is to witness this festival become what it has over the past five years. Seeing it grow and become something more than we could’ve ever dreamed of,” singer Dua Lipa wrote on X on Monday (29 July).

The record marks a huge leap in attendance since the previous edition of Sunny Hill, which took place in Prishtina’s Gërmia Park in 2022 with 15,000 attendees per day. That year, an additional festival with a different lineup was held in Tirana in celebration of the city’s title of European Youth Capital 2022.

“The capacity of the new site is huge so we are prepared for years to come”

With an expansion long overdue, Sunny Hill Festival took 2023 off to develop a “huge” new site in the village of Bërnicë e Poshtme, a 15-minute drive from the city.

The 17-hectare site, leased for 99 years from the municipality of Prishtina, worked “extremely well” for the festival’s return in 2024, according to Dugi.

“We are very proud to have turned a construction dump site into a park,” he tells IQ. “The site was full of rubble, dumped after the nearby motorway was made, and it took us a year to work on it and level it up. We also planted about 700 trees.”

Development on the site will continue ahead of Sunny Hill 2025, with more greenery to be added and infrastructure to be improved, but Dugi says the festival has found its long-term home, with plenty of room for growth.

“The capacity of the new site is huge so we are prepared for years to come,” he says. “We are hoping that next year, we will have 40,000 people and increase that for the next five to 10 years until we reach the full 90,000 capacity of the site.”

“Sunny Hill is helping to change the rhetoric about Kosovo as a war-torn country”

One of the family’s motives for growing Sunny Hill Festival is to help evolve the perception of Kosovo as a war-torn country after the brutal Kosovo War in the late 1990s.

“Sunny Hill is helping to change the rhetoric about Kosovo as a war-torn country and showing it in a different light,” says Dugi.

“For the first and second editions of the festival, it was a little bit harder to persuade artists of international calibre to come here… they didn’t know what to expect.

“But international visitors are very pleasantly surprised – Kosovo is probably the most progressive country in the Balkans and the youth in this country is very cool and clued in.

“Plus, artists have praised us for our production and hospitality and the unparalleled energy of our audience and the music industry is small so word has spread.”

Word has spread outside of the music industry too, with the festival attracting 45% of international visitors. This could be partly due to the €200 ticket price which is expensive in Kosovo but competitive in Europe.

“It is an amazing price,” says Dugi. “We are the cheapest festival in Europe to see major acts.”

Sunny Hill Festival will return to Prishtina, Kosovo, next year.

Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.

Read More Like This

News|08 Apr 2024

DHP Family’s charity festival raises £81k for unhoused

One-day UK festival Beat The Streets has raised nearly £500k for local charity Framework since its 2018 inception

News|29 May 2024

Dua Lipa unveils Asia leg of Radical Optimism tour

Produced by Live Nation, the tour will visit Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea

News|02 Jul 2024

Dua Lipa to headline Wembley Stadium in 2025

In the wake of headlining Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage, the singer has announced her biggest standalone concert to date

News|12 Jul 2024

Dua Lipa announces second Wembley Stadium show

The first show at the 90,000-cap London stadium sold out in just five minutes