One of the organisers of last summer’s Keflavík Music Festival says he and his partner lost about 30 million ISK planning the ill-fated event.
In a lengthy statement posted on Facebook, festival organiser Ólafur Geir Jónsson put the main problem down to trying to do too much, resulting in heavy losses for he and his partner, Pálmi Þór Erlingsson.
“The truth is that the festival ended 30 million ISK in the minus column,” Ólafur wrote, “We lost our assets, our cars, we lost everything. While we were abandoning this, people actually thought we were cheating everyone and everything.”
Explaining further, Ólafur elaborated, “It’s easy to get confused when it comes to setting up a big music festival, when there’s only two people running it. When I was in the office with the final line-up in front of me, I thought it wasn’t anything special, which is of course crazy. You just always wanted to get more and more, add just a little bit. In the end, 120 acts were booked. The festival had become too big. I booked two additional musicians who were really excited to come here, but I had to cancel them, as the budget had long run out. One of those musicians is named Ludicris, and the other is Steve Aoki.”
As reported earlier this summer, numerous musicians who initially signed up for the festival ended up canceling, due largely to logistical reasons and poor organising.
The organisers would eventually apologise for the festival unraveling, but this message from Ólafur marks the first detailed explanation as to how everything went wrong.
Buy subscriptions, t-shirts and more from our shop right here!
