Waves Festival Conference 2021

This year’s conference programme takes up the festival’s focus on the Danube region and understands it not as a pandemic-related restriction but as an overdue, in-depth examination of the macro-region of the countries along the Danube.

Experts from the Danube countries Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine will present their music markets and discuss cross-border topics.

The engagement with this region serves economic and cultural interests. On the one hand, regional cooperation aims to overcome the prevailing differences in economic performance and thus play a significant role as a strong region within a pan-European music export strategy that also addresses non-European music markets. Furthermore, there are long historical cultural relations within the Danube region that still lead to exciting musical projects today.

International festivals and conferences usually focus on the big players. The most successful festivals, labels and agencies of the world’s largest music markets. The thematic concentration on one region allows a closer look at the diverse scenes and the players on several levels. For the participants of the conference and for the acts who can be seen live at the festival, this should result in realistic and promising opportunities to find future contact and cooperation partners in the various networking formats within the framework of the conference.