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About this event
When 100,000 young people gather at a festival, who is responsible for the world they step into - and the ideas they carry home?
Festivals are among the most powerful spaces of collective experience left in Europe. For millions of young people, a festival is not just entertainment - it is where values, identities, and worldviews are shaped in real time, at scale, in the company of peers. What festivals choose to amplify - and what they choose to tolerate - is not a question of artistic freedom alone. It is a question of cultural responsibility.
Two realities frame this conversation.
In Serbia, EXIT Festival - born in 2000 as a student movement against Slobodan Milošević - was cancelled in 2025 after its founders chose to stand with the student protests against the Vučić government and were stripped of over €1.5 million in public funding. Cultural freedom mattered more than business continuity. Over 25 years, EXIT became one of the most recognised festivals in Europe - Best Overseas Festival (UK Festival Awards, 2007), Best Major European Festival (European Festival Awards, 2013 and 2017), Take a Stand Award (European Festival Awards, 2025). Its ecosystem produced five international awards across three festivals built by the same team. EXIT's story is not about what the music industry lost in Serbia. It is about what the music industry must defend everywhere.
Across the region, hip-hop and trap festivals have grown explosively, drawing hundreds of thousands of young attendees - many of them minors. Their stages amplify artists whose lyrics routinely normalise misogyny, drug use, and violence. Freedom of expression is a fundamental value. But the question remains: what is a festival's responsibility when the content it curates shapes a generation's understanding of what is acceptable?
These are not isolated tensions. They represent a fault line running through the entire European festival sector: the tension between commercial growth and cultural responsibility, between artistic freedom and the duty of care toward young audiences, between democratic values and the normalisation of harm.
What are festivals building in the minds of a generation? Where is the line between artistic expression and the curatorial amplification of harm? And what does it mean to take a stand - when taking a stand can cost you everything?
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