Published
Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 13:54
- The long-running festival is permanently relocating to the southern French city of Montpellier.
I Love Techno will no longer take place in Ghent.
The festival has been held in the Belgian city annually since 1995, bringing up to 35,000 people to the Flanders Expo Centre with each edition. It's now among the world's most recognisable large-scale techno events, with several satellite versions founded at numerous European locations (spin-offs have been held in the Netherlands, UK, Ireland and more). One such spin-off has been going down in Montpellier, France, since 2011.
The European expansion coincided with dwindling attendance numbers in Ghent, as crowds shrank to between 20,000 and 26,000 people per showing. According to Het Laatste Nieuws, former I Love Techno organiser Peter Decuypere partly blames the shrinking crowds on the festival embracing genres like dubstep and electro house. "The map was redrawn by dubstep and electro," he says. "I think that caused a lot of damage to the I Love Techno brand."
I Love Techno will now only be held in Montpellier for the foreseeable future. This year's edition is due to go down on December 19th, with the lineup TBA.