Darker Clouds For Roskilde Festival?

ROSKILDE, Denmark (VIP-Booking) attended Northern Europe’s biggest festival in Roskilde again this year. Roskilde Festival with its 130.000 festival-goers and volunteers, becomes Denmark’s fourth largest city measured by population during the festival days. This year was the 47th edition of the festival and once again the 80,000 full festival tickets were sold out.

It is indisputable that Roskilde Festival’s unique non-profit brand is unrivalled in Denmark.
It is also a well-known fact that you can count on changeable weather at the festival and 2017 was no exception, but in the future darker and severer clouds may come to Roskilde.

The Danish government has recently presented a financial proposal, which indicates that Roskilde Festival doesn’t meet the demands of a non-profit organisation and therefore they should not have a value-added tax (VAT) exemption.

According to Managing Director, Signe Lopdrup, this couldn’t be more wrong. She has recently made a public letter to the Danish Minister of Finance, Kristian Jensen and the Danish Minister of Culture, Mette Bock, where she argues that Roskilde Festival is a 100% non-profit organisation with all profits going to social and cultural charities. In 2016 Roskilde Festival donated 17 million DKK (nearly 2.3 million euro) to non-profit purposes and it is estimated that the profit from 2017 will reach the same amount.

Signe Lopdrup points out that since the beginning of the 70’s the Roskilde Festival Charity Society has donated more than 320 million DKK (43 million euro) to charity. Being exempt from VAT makes this possible and if Roskilde Festival is to keep on generating funds to donate to humanitarian and cultural initiatives, the Danish Government must reconsider before they implement the financial proposal.

VIP-News will follow this debate closely as the outcome could affect big music events such as Roskilde Festival in the future, but we are most likely to attend Roskilde Festival again in 2018 even if it involves dark clouds.