LIVEUROPE announces first year's results

Liveurope, the live music platform uniting 13 European venues to support them in their efforts of programming international emerging acts, has presented its first official yearly results at the Reeperbahn Festival Conference in Hamburg saying over 300 artists were supported across 13 music venues


The platform, which is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and coordinated by Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, was launched in October 2014, becoming the first collaboration of international venues with the purpose of increasing the circulation of up-and-coming European musicians.

The venues are supported through a progressive bonus mechanism based on the amount of emerging, non-national artists booked every year. Concluding the first year of Liveurope, the displayed results clearly demonstrated the practical benefits of the funding system.

“Becoming a part of Liveurope not only gave us a greater opportunity to include more European artists in our programming, but has also given us a direct chance to collaborate with top European venues and learn from them”, said Dirk de Clippeleir, Managing Director of Ancienne Belgique.

The results of the 2015 season of the Liveurope platform have positively exceeded expectations, with a grand total of 559 up-and-coming European acts hosted.  The data also shows a 23% increase of emerging European acts compared to the 2014 season. On average, the venues showcased 12 nationalities with a total of 32 countries represented.

“We’re consciously booking bands from countries we haven’t booked before to increase the diversity of bands represented in the programming.” said Pedro Azevedo from Musicbox. “Having an exchange of communication between the venues is also a great advantage of this initiative”.

Out of all the emerging European bands booked in the member venues, the United Kingdom represents just below 30% of the booked acts, while the remaining top imported bands represent Germany with 10%, France with 8%, Belgium with 7%, Denmark with 7%, and Sweden with 4% respectively. 

The results of Liveurope in the first year of the platform directly show the potential that music venues can have with the right type of encouragement. Thanks to a continued support from the European Union and with increased experience in the coming years, the platform’s ambition is to program more and more concerts to give artists from every corner of Europe a chance to gain exposure on tours across the continent.