Festival market is exploding: “Holland is a world champion when it comes to celebrating festivals”

By Bob Ligthart 31 May 2019

The festival season has been going on for a while now and every year there are new parties where we can go to. Almost nowhere in the world are there so many festivals as in the Netherlands: certainly not if we’re talking about hardcore events. “The Netherlands has an abundance of festivals.”

Dutch newspaper ‘de Volkskrant’ wrote an article about the fact the Netherlands is the world champion when it comes to celebrating and organizing festivals. Over the past five years there were almost 200 extra ‘tent camps’, especially in the south of the country. This was of course about all festivals in general, but also in the hardcore scene we see more and more outdoor events. For example Phoenix Festival was introduced in 2018, and not even two weeks ago we enjoyed the very first edition of TITANIUM Festival.

“The Netherlands has an abundance of festivals and must be the most dedicated festival country in the world”, according to de Volkskrant. Especially in hardcore the Netherlands is ahead of the rest of the world, since there’s no other time with so many hardcore being blasted through the speakers than during the Dutch festival summer. Besides festivals such as Harmony of Hardcore, Ground Zero and Hardshock, the biggest hardcore event of the world – Dominator – also takes place in this country.

Dominator is a good example of the increasingly interest in hardcore festivals, since the amount of visitors has gone through the roof over the past years. During the first edition, Dominator had around 11,000 visitors, and now it has developed into the hardcore Valhalla, during which 50,000 fanatics come together. So there aren’t only more festivals, but they are also becoming bigger and better organized – that’s why we can agree the words of ‘de Volkskrant’. With that many good festivals, the Netherlands can call itself the world champion of celebrating festivals, certainly when it comes to hardcore.

The Netherlands world champion in celebrating and organizing festivals

So, Holland really show where a small country can be big in: celebrating festivals. That’s why it will be an amazing festival season again this year in The Netherelands.