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FKP Scorpio parts ways with Tinderbox and Northside

FKP Scorpio has sold its stake in leading Danish festivals Northside and Tinderbox for an undisclosed sum to Down the Drain Holding, which now owns 100% of both events.

Down the Drain, owned by festival directors Brian Nielsen and Flemming Myllerup and Beatbox Entertainment founder Mads Sørensen, is also the majority owner of Beatbox, and the co-owner of the new Haven festival in Copenhagen.

German-based FKP will continue to own a minority share of Beatbox, which books both festivals.

“We would like to thank the Danish team for their good collaboration so far, and are happy that we will continue to cooperate with Mads Sørensen and the rest of the Beatbox Entertainment team”, says Folkert Koopmans, CEO of FKP Scorpio.

“We have long wanted to consolidate the festivals under the Down the Drain umbrella”

Down the Drain Group CEO Nielsen says the company will now operate as an independent player in the Danish festival market.

“We have long wanted to consolidate the festivals under the Down the Drain umbrella, which today serves as Scandinavia’s largest independent concert and festival organiser,” he adds, “and we are pleased that it has fallen into place.”

In addition to Tinderbox, Northside and Haven, Down the Drain will in 2018 organise Sommertid i Søndermarken (1–2 June) in Copenhagen, Komos Festival (22–23 June) in Odense and Copenhagen and, through Beatbox, shows by Arctic Monkeys, Haim, the Black Angels, Calexico and Bon Iver.

 


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First-year success for Haven festival

Beatbox Entertainment has spoken of the success of the inaugural Haven festival, its first event in Copenhagen, after selling close to 20,000 tickets in its debut year.

Despite losing headliner Chance the Rapper to “scheduling conflicts” with three months to go, the 20,000-cap. festival – held, in a departure from Beatbox’s greenfield events Tinderbox and NorthSide, on the site of former shipyard on 11–12 August – fell just short of selling out, with around 150 tickets left, spokesman Sigurd Hartkorn Plaetner tells IQ.

“In a narcissistic way it was a little bit frustrating [not to sell out],” jokes Hartkorn Plaetner. “But it’s better than if we did sell out and lots of people didn’t come.”

Haven 2017 headliners included Bon Iver, Iggy Pop and Beach House, as well as the National, whose members Aaron and Bryce Dessner co-curated the event alongside chef Claus Meyer and Mikkellers brewery founder Mikkel Borg Bjergsø.

“It’s not really a festival. It’s a two-day experiment”

Hartkorn Plaetner says all the collaborators were “super involved in building up the whole festival”. Musically, he says, the booking philosophy was to focus on quality, rather than quantity – “We could have said, ‘We want 50 acts, a bit of world music, a bit of African music, et cetera’,” he explains, “but we decided we would rather have have 20 really, really strong acts” – with visual arts and a strong F&B line-up also key to the festival’s success.

“It’s about taking various disciplines and making them something you can experience together,” he continues. “At traditional festivals you drink beer to get drunk between concerts; at Haven, the shows were as much something you see between the beer experiences!

“The way I like to think about it is that it’s not really a festival. It’s really a two-day experiment – but you can’t say to your friends, ‘Hey, do you want to get tickets for a two-day experiment…?'”

Haven Festival will return in 2018.

 


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