Festivalinfo

» see festivalinfo.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Anders Lövkvist and Mikael Josefsson started it in the summer of 2001, with Marcus Österberg, as the kind of thing you build because the information you want does not exist anywhere in one place. From 2002 it listed Northern European music festivals and concerts, in Swedish, and by 2007 it was sending people to more than three hundred festivals a year and publishing reports back from them.

That is a real editorial operation for a site that began as somebody's evening project. Studentis Group bought it in the autumn of 2007, which is also when the English edition at festivalinfo.net and a mobile version at festivalinfo.mobi appeared, the standard 2007 expansion package. Underneath the listings there was a forum, and the forum is what made it a place rather than a database. Lineups get announced once. Whether the campsite floods and which bus actually goes out there, that part needs people.

Festival culture is one of those things that looks universal and is not. Sweden's circuit had a shape that a single national site could actually cover, a couple of dozen names that everybody knew and a summer short enough to fit them all in. Turkey's festivals in the same years ran on a different model, city-based and sponsor-branded, and the information moved through the promoter rather than through an independent site with a forum. No Turkish equivalent of this ever got built, and looking at how thoroughly this one covered its country, that is a real gap and not just a difference.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the practical part ~

The best festival sites were never about music criticism. They were logistics, written by people who had slept in the mud the previous August and had opinions about which gate to use. A lineup announcement is press-release work that any outlet can copy. Knowing that one particular festival's shuttle stops running at eleven is the thing you cannot get from the organizer, and it is the thing the forum held.

~ small country, one site ~

Sweden's web produced a lot of these: one site per subject, national in scope, run for years by roughly the same handful of people. Lunarstorm did it for being a teenager and Passagen did it for being online at all. Festivalinfo's subject was the summer.

The model works at the scale of a country with nine million people and one language. It does not survive contact with a platform that does the same job globally for free, which in this case was Facebook events first and then the ticketing apps, both of which knew what you had bought and could tell you about the next thing without a volunteer writing it up.

~ 26 April 2025 ~

There was no announcement to find. The front page kept answering long after it had stopped being maintained: the copy the Archive took on 26 April 2025 still carries the old Drupal theme and an ad tag pointing at an ad network, and the dates in the content run out around 2023 and 2024. Nothing was captured after that, and festivalinfo.se does not resolve today.

So the death is a bracket rather than a date. Somewhere between the last update nobody logged and the renewal nobody paid, twenty-four years of a national festival record went off the internet quietly enough that the Swedish Wikipedia article about it still needed a note in October 2025 explaining that the site is not there anymore.

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