AARHAUS, Denmark (VIP-NEWS) — Denmark will be the focus country for Eurosonic Noorderslag 2018, booker Robert Meijerink announced at the Spot festival in Aarhus.
The conference and showcase festival, which returns to Groningen, Netherlands, from 17 to 20 January, last year focused on Portugal following 2016’s spotlight on the central and eastern European (CEE) countries.
“We have been amazed by the quality and diversity of Danish acts who have performed at Eurosonic in the past,” explained Meijerink, whose Spot Festival will partner with Music Export Denmark (MXF) to promote Denmark’s presence at ESNS. “Lots of Danish artists are making great music and are successful worldwide. The Danish music scene is booming – a great reason to put the focus on Denmark.”
ESNS already partners with many of Denmark’s leading festivals, including Roskilde, NorthSide and Tinderbox, through its European Talent Exchange Programme (ETEP) initiative, and has previously welcomed Danish acts including Agnes Obel, Mø, Iceage, Liima and Lukas Graham.
“Eurosonic is quite simply the showcase festival where you get to play for the largest possible amount of European promoters and festivals at once,” adds Sarah Sølvsteen of Copenhagen’s Birdseye Agency. “So, with the right timing in regards to the artist’s development, there are incredibly good chances of making concrete results and deals.
“Mø played Eurosonic for the first time in 2013. At that time, she still wasn’t signed to any foreign label, so it was early in her career. Nevertheless, she had received great exposure on different American and British blogs, and in the industry in general, so people came to her show at Eurosonic. This immediately resulted in several deals with European promoters and got on the bill for several European festivals. The next year, she played there again, [and there were] new offers on the table…
“All this amounted to her shows selling out in many European cities before she even got a radio hit.”
