‘The party is back’: rise in European music festivals banning smartphones

Many partygoers who attended Amsterdam’s No Art festival this summer will have had the time of their lives – but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from their social media channels.

At the gates of the all-day dance event at the Dutch city’s Flevopark in July, ticket holders were told to drop their smartphones into provided envelopes, with the strict instruction not to retrieve the addictive electronic device until the end of the night.

Organisers Bora Güney and Ruud Boymans came up with their no-phones policy after becoming frustrated with guests recording or livestreaming their shows on their mobiles.

One distinctive feature of events curated by the pair is that the thumping beats bellowing from the speakers are regularly paused for “art moments”, such as solo musicians playing guitar or saxophone. “But there was a point a few years ago when everyone in the room was watching these special interludes through their smartphone screen,” said Güney. “They might as well have watched the show on a laptop in their bedroom.”

“Banning mobile phones from the dancefloor has made a tremendous difference,” said Boymans. “People are in the moment, they talk to each other, they make friends. The party is back.”

At next year’s festival, the pair are planning to ask people to lock their phones in specially designed wallets that can only be unsealed with a magnet at the exit or the bar.

Across Europe, live music promoters are coming up with similar strategies this summer. At Voodoo festival, a boutique electronic music event held in the shadow of Humbeek Castle in Belgium’s Grimbergen municipality on 7 September, visitors to the Oracle stage have to put a sticker over the camera on their smartphone before they can enter, a routine that was pioneered by nightclubs such as Berlin’s Berghain.

“Last year, some people were filming the whole evening,” said Voodoo festival organiser Maxim Dekegel. “We want people to be in the moment again and to listen to the music.”

The reaction to the festival’s partial no-phone policy has been surprisingly positive, he added, with only a few ticket holders bemoaning the fact that they would have no footage of the event to share with friends. He assured them that professional photographers would be on the dancefloor to document the atmosphere.

“It’s a test of how far we can go back to a pre-digital era,” said Dekegel. “You have to do it step by step.”

Weaning yourself off social media will be as hard for event organisers as for the partying crowds, said Gunn Enli, an associate professor at Oslo University’s department of media and communication, who has been doing field research on smartphone use at live events.

There’s a lot of ambivalence. Promoters want the social media buzz but don’t want people on their phones all the time

Gunn Enli, Oslo University

“There’s a lot of ambivalence here,” Enli said. “The promoters want the hashtags, the video clips, the social media buzz. But they also don’t want people to be on their phones the whole time.”

Her research suggests many music fans would not require draconian measures to limit use of their mobiles, as they were already showing more restraint in their smartphone use at festivals and gigs of their own accord.

“Over the last two years we have seen a shift at the biggest festivals in Oslo,” Enli said. “More people are putting their phones in their pockets when the music starts and leaving them there. There is now more social cache to not being seen as a slave to social media.”

At the Campus festival in the southern German city of Konstanz in May, German indie-pop band Juli interrupted a performance of their 2004 hit single Perfekte Welle to urge the crowd to stop filming them.

“Our fans always look forward to this song because it was our biggest hit,” said singer Eva Briegel. “But as soon as they hear the first chords the hands with the phones go up in the air and all the energy that we as a band feed off is gone.”

Before restarting, Briegel reminded the crowd that Perfekte Welle (Perfect Wave) was a song about living in the moment, and that no smartphone video would ever match the experience of hearing it live. Three months on, she said fans still write to her saying her plea was the highlight of the festival.

Those supporters most in need of such educational measures were aged over 40, Briegel said. “The people I see at our gigs with a glass of beer in the one hand and their mobile phone held aloft in the other are mostly older fans,” she said. Digital natives, by contrast, had already developed their own code of conduct. “The younger the people, the better their digital hygiene.”

“By far the biggest driver behind declining phone use at concerts is seeing uncool people do it, who younger people don’t want to be associated with,” said Enli.