In his memorable assessment of IQ last year, Rammstein promoter Scumeck Sabottka and Robbie Williams, MCT Agentur, poked fun at the German market.
“It sucks,” he says. Larger products are still selling, but the mid-range segment is struggling. And that’s the most important thing, because we don’t just live on cakes, we live on bread. And all the bread is gone.
This year, Sabottka hasn’t radically changed his point of view: “It turns out that tours of large stadiums and arenas are being promoted well, while artists in medium-sized clubs and halls perform as well as they did before the pandemic, but that’s just my private observation,” he says. “Overall, I would say the business is stagnant and not healthy. Hopefully in 2024 it will be better. “
Other developers have reported similar challenging situations in a market characterized by emerging prices, oversaturation and unpredictable demand for all the most prestigious events. Although more Germans than ever are attending the shows, the sheer number of these shows has led to low sales. In many cases, while many successful events have managed to buck this trend, the general feeling is that of a crowded market that cannot be trusted.
“Compared to before the pandemic, I think there’s more activity,” says Sina Hall, head of overseas bookings at Semmel Concerts. “And it’s a little bit more complicated because now everyone is back.
“It’s a little more mysterious and harder to say what the complicated price of selling tickets for an event will be”
“Because its markets reopened much earlier, the U. S. government is now willing and able to focus on Europe again, so there’s a lot of content going on and the markets are now complicated. We all settle for the fact that everything is much more expensive, and that it is a little more mysterious and more difficult to know what the price of selling tickets for an event will be. You can’t necessarily compare this to pre-pandemic conditions.
But even if all goes well, Germany is still the largest live music market in Europe and the third largest in the world. In addition to the cities with the highest concert attendance, such as Berlin, Cologne, Munich, Hamburg and Frankfurt, it has 35 other cities with around 200,000 inhabitants and, at most, numerous local shows and events in them.
Local giant CTS Eventim has significant strength in the German market, with stakes in promoters FKP Scorpio, Semmel, DreamHaus, Peter Rieger Konzertagentur and several regional developers, as well as venues such as Cologne’s Lanxess Arena and the Waldbühne Berlin. La organization made profits of €1. 02 billion for the first part of this year and noted that Germany, along with Italy and Austria, are among the main drivers.
FKP Scorpio is based in Hamburg and presides over more than 25 festivals across Europe. The company will tour this year with bands including The National and Queens of the Stone Age and will also sell out Taylor Swift’s Eras Stadium dates in Germany next year.
The FKP’s portfolio of German festivals is strong. This year’s sister events, Southside and Hurricane, in the south of the city of Neuhausen ob Eck and at the Eichenring motorcycle circuit in Scheeßel in the north, were sold out this year: 78,000 participants in Hurricane and 60,000 in Southside, and Muse. , Die Ärzte, Placebo, Queens of the Stone Age, The 1975 and Loyle Carner Headline.
“Rising costs for virtually everything continue to take their toll”
To improve their health, the festivals temporarily sold 50,000 tickets for the 2024 editions on the first day of presale. ” As we have not yet published any events for next year, this result is also a great vote of confidence, something that is even more valuable than any economic success,” said FKP founder and CEO Folkert Koopmans.
Other German festivals of the FKP include Highfield, M’era Luna, Rolling Stone Beach, Metal Hammer Paradise, A Summer’s Tale, Plage Noire and Deichbrand. Berlin’s open-air festival, Tempelhof Sounds, produced with DreamHaus and Loft Concerts, took a break this year. after its debut in 2022, as its Tempelhof airport is home to a growing number of refugee shelters.
“The rising prices of virtually everything continue to wreak havoc,” Stephan Thanscheidt, leader of the FKP, told IQ in July. “Because of this, the decrease in demand and purchasing power, many festivals are struggling and we know that their numbers will be further minimized in the future. “
M’era Luna positioned itself in front of 25,000 fans in Hildesheim in August, adding the participation of artists such as Within Temptation and Ville Valo. The Highfield Festival, organized with Semmel Concerts, attracted 35,000 enthusiasts in August, while the 60,000-seat Deichbrand Festival in Cuxhaven on Germany’s North Sea coast sold out in July.
Semmel is the German titan, consistently ranked among the world’s top promoters. It has a jam-packed schedule of exhibits and primary shows, totaling more than 1,500 times a year for more than five million visitors, with Hans Zimmer, the wonderful Schlager Roland Kaiser, and Elton John’s blockbuster Rocketman In Concert among the stars, to go up to many major exhibitions and a burgeoning exhibition sector.
“We want to take action now that will make our lives and our industry imaginable in the future. “
With this in mind, Semmel has introduced a show on the Reeperbahn for the first time this year, with 8 artists on the bill, plus German and American artists in a diversity of genres. “I think it shows how much we value the progression of young artists. ” says Hall. “We want to take steps now that will make our lives and our industry imaginable in the future. ”
Of the other Eventim-affiliated promoters, DreamHaus, founded by Matt Schwarz, former MD and COO of Live Nation GSA, handles the Eventim-owned twin Rock am Ring and Rock im Park festivals – which bring a combined attendance of 150,000 to Nuremberg in June, this year with Foo Fighters, Kings of Leon, and Die Toten Hosen as headliners – in addition to numerous artist shows.
Live Nation has been in the news in Germany for 8 years, since the takeover of the tough MLK operation. The years that followed were, predictably, intense, with Live Nation GSA hosting over 50 outdoor events in front of over 3 million people. visitors summer 2023.
A first edition of Rolling Loud Germany drew 60,000 to Munich’s Messe München fairgrounds in July for a hip-hop extravaganza spearheaded by Wizkid, Kendrick Lamar, and Travis Scott. Superbloom, staged in Munich in early September by Live Nation-owned Goodlive for the second time, sold 50,000 tickets on each of its two days, and Superbloom director Fruzsina Szép pronounced the event “almost perfect.”
“There are many other models to swoon with”
“It was an absolutely beautiful and calm atmosphere throughout those two days,” she told IQ days after the festival. “I’ve never experienced a festival like this, that I’ve been involved with.”
In April, Live Nation’s Lollapalooza Berlin became the first festival in Germany to earn DIN ISO 20121 sustainability accreditation. However, its 111,000-cap German Download at the Hockenheimring was cancelled due to production issues resulting from this year’s busy summer season.
Among its many artists, Array Live Nation GSA also sold out 8 stadium concerts this summer for Germany’s honorary Depeche Mode: two in Berlin, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf; one in Munich and one in Leipzig, and the band returns for 8 arenas in early 2024.
Cautious but immensely wealthy and enthusiastic about the post-Covid period, German live entertainment organization DEAG unveiled its expansion plans for 2023 in August, with a profit target of more than €300 million and a ticket sales price of €10 million (up from €9 million). in 2022, and an expectation of 6,000 occasions in its main European markets. The company also revealed in its first-half financial results that it had “several acquisitions in complex negotiation stages. “
The company had a strong summer of festivals, welcoming more than 800,000 visitors to its festivals between the end of June and the beginning of September. A new acquisition, the German electronic dance festival Airbeat One, attracted another 70,000 people in its 20th edition. anniversary. Other major acquisitions in 2022 include psytrance summer event Indian Spirit in Eldena and the Classic Open Air at Berlin’s Gfinisharmenmarkt, which will be added to a portfolio that includes the Ruhr-in-Love, Nature One and Kessel festivals.
“If you look at their audience, it’s almost 4 generations there. “
DEAG-owned Wizard Promotions has plenty of accomplishments to add to the pot, adding Scorpions, the KISS farewell tour, and a breakneck run in the Iron Maiden arena. “They know what they’re doing and they can get into the market very well. “” says Oliver Hoppe, CEO of Wizard, of Britain’s Heavy Steel Heroes. “Every show sold out: one of the most productive Maiden tours I’ve ever seen. If you look at their audience, they are now almost 4 generations. In it. For a lot of young people, 18 or even younger, this total steel and rock thing is starting to make a bit of a comeback now.
All the same, Hoppe echoes the sense of a market still trying to regain its feeling for what works. “Pre-Covid, there was a certain formula and understanding of things: if you do this, then that will happen,” he says. “Post-Covid, a lot has changed. Anything that has a brand name does well, to a certain degree, and often regardless of the ticket price. When people know what they are getting for their money, they don’t really care how much they spend on it. But if they are paying €100 for a big show, maybe they don’t go to the smaller shows, the bands they haven’t seen before – they save up for a couple of months for the bigger ticket.”
Among other prominent national promoters in Germany, Hamburg-based Karsten Jahnke Konzertdirektion organizes around 1,300 concerts a year, of which 900 as part of its own tours in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and around 400 as a local component in Hamburg for other promoters. Upcoming performances include a two-date appearance in Hamburg on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour with AEG Presents and a host of other occasions, from Björk to BABYMETAL.
In the field of festivals, its occasions are the Stadtpark Open Air concert series in Hamburg’s municipal park, via Jahnke in 1975, as well as the JazzNights, Elbjazz and Überjazz festivals, as well as Way Back When and Campus Spring Break in the Ruhr region. .
Other independents in the German market include Berlin-based booker and national promoter Z|ART, whose shows lately include Boy
“When other people know what they’re getting for their money, they don’t care how much they spend on it. “
Among the other key festival organisers on the market, Cosmopop is guilty of the electronic festival Time Warp, founded 29 years ago in Mannheim and beyond; Opus produces the famous Jazzopen Stuttgart; while the ICS (International Concert Service) controls the mythical Wacken Open Air in Schleswig-Holstein, one of the largest rock festivals in the world.
From a geographical and promotional point of view, Germany is a huge and highly regionalised market, in which the 16 Länder have significant local differences. Traditionally, national promoters partner with local promoters for exhibitions in express cities, although the barriers are sometimes less defined.
National promoters organize their own exhibitions in the cities where they have a presence, and some hire local specialists in-house. For example, Wizard Promotions and its sister company Handwerker Promotion formed a local joint venture in 2018 called Rhein-Main Concerts in Frankfurt will produce occasions in the southwestern region of the country.
However, the old formula is largely still in place, with tough local promoters, such as Eventim’s Dirk Becker Entertainment, which operates in the Rhine-Ruhr region of western Germany, encompassing Cologne; DEAG’s Global Concerts, founded in Munich; Hanover concerts in the northern city of the same name; and Undercover, founded in Braunschweig and operating in northern Germany and beyond.
German recording giant BMG acquired Undercover in 2020. It has booked Berlin’s 1,600-seat Theater des Westens until the end of 2024 for a series of residencies by domestic and international recording artists, as well as stage musical productions, and curated the live programme of the Hessentag, Germany’s largest state festival, in Pfungstadt, Hesse.
The 2023 Global Promoter Report is now available.
Get more stories like this delivered to your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email roundup of live music industry news.
The second edition of the indispensable guide is significantly expanded, featuring analysis of 55 markets across six continents
In our latest chapter, we take a look at the markets of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, where the demand for music is increasing.
IQ’s new first-of-its-kind resource highlights the world’s top developers and the 40 most sensible markets in which they operate.
Promoters from Creativeman Productions and Live Nation Japan are planning the world’s second-largest music market.
In this excerpt from IQ’s 2022 Global Promoters Report, we delve into the biggest touring market in Europe and the third-biggest in the world
IQ is the leading global news platform for the live music business. IQ’s news, features, information and analysis are read by 100,000 professionals worldwide each month. IQ publishes a regular magazine, several annual reports, and a daily news digest, IQ Index. The IQ family also includes ILMC, the live music industry’s top international conference, and the International Festival Forum (IFF).