Reeperbahn Festival

… of playing an active role in shaping tomorrow’s music industry. The four-day festival in Hamburg hosted over 500 concerts and an international conference programme, thus presenting a major test for our logistics expertise.

The surprise concerts from newcomers and live performances by stars such as Jan Delay attracted 45,000 visitors to the openly accessible “Festival Village” at the Heiligengeistfeld venue. Thousands of people were also drawn to the free programme on Spielbudenplatz. Programme cooperations helped to establish a diverse range of conferences, highlighting issues such as sustainability and interfaces between technical innovation and the music industry. The 21st edition of the Reeperbahn Festival also focused on stronger involvement of the younger generation. Young people today make different decisions to their predecessors when it comes to going out, listening to music and buying things, a change in behaviour that is already impacting the creative industry. One of the many highlights was the presentation of the “Anchor” international music award to the Ukrainian artist Ganna at the St. Paul Theater.

From our point of view, the festival represented a major logistical challenge: the four jam-packed days included 540 concerts at over 40 venues, 30 events such as readings, live podcasts, art exhibitions and guided tours plus the 120-item conference program, to which 420 speakers from 31 nations attracted 5,500 professional attendees from 52 countries. On Heiligengeistfeld alone we had to equip four outdoor stages with audio and, in some cases, lighting equipment. Our mandate also covered twelve clubs around the Reeperbahn and six conference rooms in the “East Hotel”, in which we also installed video equipment. We equipped eight network and custom format spaces with media technology.

In view of the tight schedule for the set-up, we established a logistics hub on Heiligengeistfeld to make sure our operations ran smoothly. This central hub for our equipment gave us a great deal of flexibility, providing us with a location where we could prepare, program, pack and punctually deliver all our equipment to the venues. At the same time, we were also able to handle additional, short-term material orders – from a broadcast microphone to DJ equipment – taking just 15 minutes from receipt of the call to delivery to the venue.

Our network specialists designed and implement the infrastructure for high-performance LAN and WLAN for the “Festival Village – servicing the back-office area and ticketing – the “Production Office” on Spielbudenplatz, venues in hotels such as the “Arcotel Onyx” or clubs like “Übel und Gefährlich” in the former above-ground bunker in Feldstrasse. And last but not least, our IT infrastructure was used to webstream the presentation of the “Anchor Award” in the St. Paul Theater.