2020 was hard for most businesses due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Many had to adapt, some had to close, and others had to reinvent themselves. But what if your business is a four-day music festival, which only takes place once a year?
Photo: Oskar Cornelius
“Republikken Talks” invited Michael Madsen, one of the two founders of Copenhell to talk about life after the pandemic, in an ongoing series of ten talks with entrepreneurs about life after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Copenhell was born out of a shared dream in 2009 to bring back Metal and hardcore rock to the Danish live scene by Michael Madsen and Jeppe Nissen. The two friends grew Copenhell from a small beginning in 2010, with 2500 guests in two days (and a massive deficit) to a huge four-day festival with 35.000 guests a day, and huge international names such as Tool, Slipknot, Marylin Manson, Slayer and Anthrax (and Metallica 2022).
Last year — together with the rest of the live music industry, they faced the biggest challenge during the lifespan of the festival, when the world got hit by Covid-19 at the start of 2020. As an event organization a whole year’s work (and revenue) culminates in the four days the metal/ rock festival takes place, and just about 3.5 months out from the big event, the Danish government announced the nationwide lockdown in March 2020.
Photo: Oskar Cornelius
We worked on several other projects due to Covid-19, which we are taking with us into the future. The two most significant are the Test-festival and Rock Academy.
As in a series of unfortunate events, we lost all our stage props to a fire that broke out in our storage, shortly after the first lockdown was announced. We had to build up everything from the ground. It took about two weeks, where volunteers helped build new props. It created a fantastic togetherness and an atmosphere of ‘We can do this’. It’s a strength we can draw from in future of Copenhell.
Our second big project is the Rock Academy. We took a deep look at our main audience. Who are they (36 years old well-educated men) and who are we missing (women), and what can we do to attract the missing? In 2019 we had about 30% women in the audience. We would like to attract more. We came up with the idea to start a school of metal and applied for funding for a ‘Rock academy’ for the 13–19 years girls, where they can get acquainted with the metal scene, meet their heroes and female metal musicians. We have recently got funding to keep the Copenhell Rock Academy for the next three years and we are very proud of this.
We are now hiring at full speed to keep up with Copenhell and our two new projects (Test-festival and Rock Academy) and are working on a few practical issues for future events: Making sure things like the Covid pandemic is taken into account in contracts, considerations into moneyless festivals and the future use of online meetings. In a way, we are more busy than ever.