Türkiye market report: Part 2

IQ presents the second and final part of our Türkiye market report, where we explore the country’s festival and venue scenes. Catch up on part one here.

Festivals
Festivals, not necessarily an easy sell anywhere right now, are in a particularly quiet spell in Türkiye. “Fifteen to twenty years ago, festivals like Rock’n Coke brought major acts like Muse, Placebo, Kasabian, and Editors together on the same stage in a single edition,” says Burak Çekiç, booking and programming manager at Blind Istanbul.

“Today, the landscape is very different. Organising a festival with big international headliners has become much more difficult due to rising costs, high artist fees, increasing expenses for production and venue rentals, and lack of a strong financial sponsor support.

“In the past, festivals often featured multiple headliners in a single day, but now it’s more common to have just one. As a result, the number of large-scale festivals has declined, and the scene has shifted toward smaller, more niche events.” These include Barcelona’s cutting-edge urban electronic fest Sónar, whose Istanbul counterpart has taken place at Zorlu PSM for the best part of a decade, and this year offers a Chemical Brothers DJ set and Richie Hawtin’s DEX EFX X0X among its highlights across two days. Another electronic festival, Infinitum Music Festival, also takes place at the same venue in August.

Antalya’s electronic Magic Break Festival on the seashore, meanwhile, marked its 19th edition last year, though in February its organisers announced that there would be no event this April, while promising a return “when the time is right.”

The Bozcaada Jazz Festival, on the Aegean island of the same name, will return in September for its ninth edition, and İKSV’s Istanbul Jazz Festival notches up its 32nd in July across a variety of venues. The Gezgin Salon festival, operated by Salon İKSV, the performance venue of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, takes place in June at Istanbul’s Parkorman, with Air and Slowdive at the top of a two-day lineup.

Pozitif, a persistent Turkish festival promoter, has operated its Akbank Jazz Festival for 34 editions, right up to the present day, and its Babylon Soundgarden, which last year featured Floating Points and Mount Kimbie, returns to Parkorman in August.

“We only have an outdoor slot between May and October 15. After that, we have to be indoors”

Venues
As in any market, but particularly one with limited corporate involvement from outside, Turkish promoters crave more venues. “We really need indoor venues in this country, especially in winter – like, 20,000 plus,” says Zeynep Boyner, head of international event bookings at BKM. “We only have an outdoor slot between May and October 15. After that, we have to be indoors. But unfortunately, there is not enough indoor capacity. So, in the winter, the most we can do would be 5,000 or 6,000.”

Touted since 2021, work will apparently begin later this year on a new entertainment and sports arena in Turkish tourist hotspot Bodrum (also known as the Turkish Riviera) on the Aegean. The scheme appears to have significant Russian input, piloted by SportInvest Bodrum A.Ş., which was established in 2020 “with strong support [from] the Russian–Turkish Business Council” and backing from the Municipality of Bodrum and “a number of private investors,” according to the project’s website.

It is not clear whether concerts specifically feature in the Bodrum Arena’s remit. The development, with three 9,000m2 arenas, is designed for year-round ice hockey, figure skating, and other ice disciplines, as well as “mass cultural and entertainment events; scientific and public meetings; and congresses, exhibitions, and presentations.”

The largest indoor arena in Istanbul, Fenerbahçe Ülker Sports and Event Hall (13,500), is likewise heavily invested in sport but occasionally hosts gigs. More heavily frequented is the Volkswagen Arena in Maslak, one of European Istanbul’s main business districts. The arena is customisable and can host numerous configurations, with capacities ranging from 100 to 6,500.

“If you do an event in the stadium, it means 5,000 to 10,000 tickets extra because of the location”

In 2020, BKM took on responsibility for the reopened Maximum Uniq venues on the Uniq cultural complex that houses the Volkswagen Arena, with venues including a 7,000-standing outdoor arena, the 1,500-standing Maximum Uniq Box, and the formal 1,156-capacity Maximum Uniq Hall.

“This year, we had Palaye Royale at Maximum Uniq Box, and we have OneRepublic at the Maximum Uniq Açıkhava Open-Air arena in April,” says Boyner.

Beşiktaş Stadium is the popular choice for mega-gigs, having hosted Turkish stars Yıldız Tilbe and Hayko Cepkin and Kazakh singer Dimash Qudaibergen last year, in addition to Bocelli.

“It is the best location, actually,” says Hakan Özgül of Akademi Organizasyon. “If you do an event in the stadium, it means 5,000 to 10,000 tickets extra because of the location.”

Located in Zincirlikuyu, in the heart of Istanbul, Zorlu PSM is one of Europe’s largest and best-equipped performing arts centres, with more than 55,000m2 of space. It includes multiple stages, ranging from 120- to 3,200-cap, and in a representative period last summer, it hosted acts ranging from Idles to Salif Keita to jazz, world, and electronic nights – not to mention the Turkish edition of Sónar festival.

“We have approximately 1,000 events annually, and most of the events, almost 85% of them last season, were sold out,” says Hatice Arıcı, programmer at Istanbul’s Zorlu PSM. “People feel safe here, as visitors and as musicians. There are so many genres going on. Some local musicians sell out every show, and we have them in every few months, but we also have really good relations with international agencies. We can’t get many big, big, big names, but we are brave in our approach, and we don’t have any limits.”

“We need to put some diversity into the workforce especially, because there is this tendency… to show equal diversity on stage only”

Arıcı is involved with female MC and DJ collective Sista Sound and believes strongly in pushing for a better breadth of representation across the industry.

“We are focusing on empowering, I don’t want to say only women, but not just men. We need to put some diversity into the workforce especially, because there is this tendency of promoters, festivals, and venues to show equal diversity on stage only.

“In Zorlu and all the other places I’m in touch with, we are trying to show people that this is not just a formula that you just put on the stage and in the lineup of the festival. You also have to create some equal rights, equal payments, and also some fightback against what’s going on for the last maybe 30, 40 years. You have to create some slots for women, LGBTQ people, non-binaries, and [not just straight males].”

At a grassroots level, Blind in Beyoğlu is one of Istanbul’s most prominent concert venues, renowned for its standout international and local bookings and performances since 2021. The venue has a capacity of around 400, making it an intimate yet powerful space for live performances.

“Venues must balance affordability with sustainability, often leading to difficult pricing decisions, and sometimes [they] have to increase ticket prices to be able to survive,” says Çekiç. “But the gap between rising ticket costs and audience affordability is widening, so fans sometimes have to prioritise bigger acts over frequent smaller shows nowadays because of the economic challenges.”

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