Magna Charta Festivals: World Club Dome Takes The Lead

German promoter Bernd Breiter of BigCityBeats is on a roll. Since launching flagship festival World Club Dome in 2013, the brand has been on a meteoric rise – or, should we say, a stratospheric one, given that one of the many WCD spinoffs takes place on a Zero-G plane.

But first things first: the original World Club Dome is happening at Commerzbank Arena in Frankfurt, Germany. Every year, Breiter gathers notable figures of the electronic music world and beyond and puts them on some 25 stages spread across a total dance area encompassing 700,000 square meters in the stadium and its surroundings. 

The 2019 edition, which occurred June 7-9, sold a record 180,000 tickets and grossed $21,967,797, which places WCD atop this year’s Magna Charta.

Breiter founded BigCityBeats in 2004, originally as a radio station, and the first World Club Dome in Frankfurt was organized in celebration of the station’s ninth anniversary. His knack for creating special events earned the BigCityBeats founder an investment from Beyond Capital Partners, which acquired a 51-percent stake in the company in 2018.

WCD spinoffs include the WCD Pool Sessions at Frankfurt’s Stadionbad, the WCD Island Edition in Malta and the WCD Winter Edition at Düsseldorf’s Merkur Spiel-Arena.

Last year, BigCityBeats hosted an intimate gathering at the Jungfraujoch in the Bernese Alps, where the company converted the highest railway station in Europe into a 100-capacity club, as well as the second edition of its aforementioned Zero-G event, where DJs and guests boarded and danced on a special plane that simulated weightlessness by flying in a parabola.

Pinkpop, last year’s leader in the Magna Charta festival ranking, is this year’s runner-up. The festival’s 50th edition in 2019, which featured a lineup including Mumford & Sons, The Cure, Fleetwood Mac, Soham De, Nada Adjoa, David Keenan, Syml, Laura-Mary Carter, Indian Askin and more, sold 80,500 tickets and grossed $13,258,063.

Coming in third and fourth are FKP Scorpio’s flagship German festivals Hurricane and Southside. With a lineup that included Foo Fighters, The Cure, Interpol, Christine And The Queens and many more, both events contributed to the most profitable weekend in company history – a weekend where it also promoted Ed Sheeran’s biggest solo concerts yet at Hockenheimring, elsewhere in Germany. All in all, the company turned over close to $57 million that weekend.

FKP will launch Limestone Festival, a second event in South Germany, at Moosburger See this June, where Post Malone will stage his only German concert of 2020.

Meanwhile, Hurricane and Southside already confirmed Twenty One Pilots, Kings of Leon, SEEED, Deichkind, Martin Garrix, The Killers and Rise Against. “Concert-wise one of our highlights will be Taylor Swift’s exclusive and already sold out Europe show for 2020 in Berlin,” FKP Scorpio’s other CEO, Stephan Thanscheidt, said.

Another festival that already had all its headliners confirmed eight months ahead of time is Paléo in Nyon, Switzerland, which celebrates it 45th edition this year, and rounds out the Magna Charta’s top 5. 

The festival’s talent buyer Dany Hassenstein told Pollstar, that he had the first talks with agents about this year’s lineup in the fall of 2018. “It’s not a huge issue for us, we just move everything earlier and earlier. What has become more difficult is estimating the popularity curve of an act. Acts come and go very quickly, it’s difficult to know who’s going to be hot the next summer. It’s also not cool for all the up-and-coming acts, because they need to decide things 10 months in advance, before even having the chance to improve, play shows and get experience, especially live experience on stage, and to find a booker, agent, etc,” he explained.