Rocking it with Roskilde

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Music festivals are always amazing events. A heady combination of summer sun, the great outdoors, kicking live music and thousands of people ready for a party can help to create memories and friendships that will last a lifetime.

But look under the hood and it quickly becomes clear that planning, managing and running an outdoor festival is a huge task. As with any big task in the 21^st century, there are terabytes of data associated with running such an event.

One such event is the Roskilde Summer Festival. The event, held in Denmark, is the largest culture and music festival in Northern Europe. Run since 1971 by a non-profit, non-political society that supports humanitarian and cultural work, the ten-day festival hosts some of the biggest names in music.

Looking at this huge event, with a daily audience capacity of 85,000 people, Copenhagen Business School recognized that the local Roskilde Festival could act as a controlled environment for research into major issues affecting urban populations. The school partnered with IBM and the festival to give festival-goers the best experience possible using real-time analytics.

At the top level, the project intends to look at topics such as:

• The movement of crowds throughout the event;
• The sales of food and beverages over time;
• The popularity of different musical events.

Within these three areas, the team expects to look at interesting correlations. The focus for data collection will be on weather, sales and social media trends. Within these data sets, IBM will be looking to identify find patterns in the festival-goers actions.  IBM will focus on AI and Machine learning and the scientists will show examples of findings and how the data is collected in the Big Data Exploration Lab at the event itself.

The IBM Analytics, Cloud Data Services and Smarter Cities teams are helping the Roskilde Festival managers to make smarter, data-driven decisions, analysed in real time on the cloud. You can make an equally smart decision today, by getting hold of tickets for this year’s festival!

Or, you can go one better and join IBM in the Big Data Exploration Lab, register here for June 28th and here for June 29^th. But you’ll need to hurry as the event is almost sold out!