NorthSide Festival is an annual commercial music festival held in Aarhus, Denmark. Despite its commercial nature, the festival focuses not only on making profit, but also on environmental sustainability and innovation.
NorthSide Festival was established in 2010 by Danish promoter Brian Nielsen together with German concert agency FKP Scorpio. This variant of the name (with a capital letter in the middle of the word) was chosen to avoid confusion with another famous music festival – Northside Festival in Brooklyn, New York.
The first festival was a one-day event featuring performances by five Danish rock bands – Nephew, Turboweekend, Mew, Selvmord and Veto. A year later, NorthSide Festival was extended to two days, and the invited musicians included guests from abroad – Suede, White Lies, Elbow, Interpol, Band of Horses. In 2013, the festival became a three-day event, and all 25,000 tickets sold out two weeks before the event.
NorthSide Festival is a multi-genre festival, with rock, alternative rock, pop, synthpop, hip-hop, indie, and electronic music on the program. Over the years the festival has hosted such stars of the world stage as Snow Patrol, Kasabian, Garbage, Arctic Monkeys, Gogol Bordello, Tegan and Sara, Franz Ferdidand, Lana Del Rey, FKA Twigs, The Chemical Brothers, Duran Duran, Iggy Pop, Sigur Ros, Yelawolf and others.
The main sponsor of the festival is the Danish brewing company Tuborg, and this can be attributed to its advantages. The company has vast experience in organizing music festivals and supporting the music industry in general. It cooperates, among others, with the Roskilde Music Festival in Denmark and the Reading and Leeds Music Festival in the UK. It is thanks to Tuborg’s support that Aarhus is able to attract top stars to Aarhus.