At a time when just a few weeks of global political developments can feel like several months, many issues quickly slip out of focus. At the same time, growing social polarisation and economic uncertainty are putting pressure on lives and cultural diversity around the world – with consequences for musicians, promoters and music fans alike. At the same time, diversity and inclusion programmes are being discontinued, funding and donations are being cut, and sustainability strategies are being scaled back. In this context, it is important to us to strengthen our own efforts and to keep the dialogue going. Here, we explain how we are strategically developing our sustainability efforts and how, through group-wide measures, we aim to actively contribute to change. Because if not now – then when?
The term “sustainability” is used in a wide variety of contexts, which means it can quickly lose its meaning. So first of all: our understanding of sustainability is based on the report Our Common Future, better known as the Brundtland Report. It defines sustainable development as development that ensures that the needs of the present generation can be met without preventing future generations from being able to meet their needs as well. Anyone who would like to explore the topic in more depth (or simply enjoys reading reports) can do so here.
It becomes clear that sustainability is always also a question of justice, which is why we focus equally on ecological and social aspects. On this basis, we have implemented a group-wide sustainability strategy that identifies six different areas of action which we consider to be most relevant for our activities – more details can be found on our Corporate Site.
It is important to us that neither the ecological nor the social perspective is neglected – especially as rising living costs currently represent an additional burden for many people. We therefore try to calculate the costs of our events in such a way that as few people as possible are excluded. However, this is far from easy, given a cost increase of around 45% compared to the period before the pandemic. As we see it as our responsibility to promote participation in our events, we tested two targeted concepts in 2025:
• With our Unity Tickets (social tickets at heavily reduced prices), we promote access to our festivals in Germany. Initially introduced at Highfield, the project is being expanded this year to Hurricane and Southside.
• At the same time, Friendly Fire in the Netherlands implemented a pilot project focusing on concerts, testing a concept with different price categories: in addition to the regular ticket price, there was a “more to spend” and a “less to spend” option. The goal: exploring how concerts can remain affordable in a way that is beneficial for both, audience and artist.
