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‘File sharers to blame for expensive festivals’

Music fans in Norway will have to shell out more than ever before for festival tickets this summer, with one organizer blaming file sharing for the hefty price hike.

Published: 12 June 2012 16:02 CEST

'File sharers to blame for expensive festivals'

Suzann Gaber (17), Marlene Chauviere (17) and Renee Forseth (18) take in Ringo Starr and His All Star Band at last summer's Norwegian Wood (Photo: Aleksander Andersen/Scanpix)

Full passes for seven major pop and rock festivals, including Norwegian Wood, Slottsfjell, Hove, Øya and Bukta, will cost an average of 198 kroner ($33) more this summer than in 2010, broadcaster NRK has found.

“Fans have themselves to thank,” said Joakim Haugland, booking manager for the Bylarm festival.

“The record industry has always said that their products cost money to produce. That’s why this summer festival-goers are paying for illegal file sharing.”

Of the eight festivals examined by NRK, only Storås has retained the same prices it charged two years ago.

Jørgen Roll, who heads up the Norwegian Wood festival in Oslo, attributed the price increase primarily to a marked rise in artists’ fees.

“We’ve been doing this for more than 20 years and the development has been explosive in that period. It has to with supply and demand,” he told NRK.

Prices for a festival pass for Norwegian Wood have shot up by almost 800 kroner since 2007.

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New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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