After the Ticino concert series had to be canceled twice due to the corona pandemic, Moon & Stars will take place again in Locarno in 2022. But now the program is causing trouble.
As part of Moon & Stars in 2022, only men will appear on the main stage of the Piazza Grande in Locarno.
On the one hand, it’s gratifying. After the Ticino open-air festival Moon & Stars fell victim to the corona pandemic for the last two summers, it will now take place again in 2022. On the other hand, this year’s program is causing a stir on social media and in the Swiss music scene. The singer/songwriter Sophie Hunger, in particular, spoke on Twitter of a “free show of discrimination”.
The open-air concert series, which attracts tens of thousands of music fans to the Piazza Grande in Locarno every evening from July 15th to 23rd, can come up with big names from national and international stars. The so-called headliners include, for example, the Italian Zucchero, the Brit James Blunt and the German alt-punk band Die Toten Hosen. The Swiss scene is represented by artists such as Bligg, Loco Escrito, Marc Sway and the dialect band Hecht.
But where have the musicians gone for the sake of the moon and stars? The year is 2022 and there isn’t a single artist in the main program of Moon & Stars.
The Controversial Market
Dani Büchi assures him that he would have liked to bring a female pop musician to Locarno. On the one hand, the organizer, who took over the 2020 summer concert series from Ringier, points out problems in connection with Corona: This year, various concerts that had already been staged three years ago would have to be rescheduled.
On the other hand, the market is controversial, and organizers cannot choose freely. So they wanted to include Amy McDonald in the program; the Scot, popular in Switzerland, is now performing in Zurich. Stefanie Heinzmann was also asked, but no suitable date could be found for the Valaisan. In the end he has to sell ten thousand tickets per evening in Locarno, says Büchi, so that a concert is worthwhile. A megastar like Billie Eilish fits into this segment just as little as talented young artists, who are very present in Locarno on the smaller side stage.
The men’s program is obviously an oversight, the somewhat unfortunate entanglement of entrepreneurial constraints and coincidences. Nevertheless, it remains irritating, especially since the proportion of women in pop is otherwise steadily increasing. Female stars such as Nena, Gianna Nannini and Christina Aguilera have also repeatedly appeared at the Moon & Stars Festival in recent years. And in Switzerland, the scene has long been shaped by artists like Sina or Steffe la Cheffe, Priya Ragu or Joya Marleen.
No quotas
The growing influence of female musicians was also evident at the Swiss Music Awards (SMA) this year, where the St. Gallen singer Joya Marleen emerged as the big winner. This is revealing insofar as no women were nominated for the SMA 2018. At that time, groups of women musicians such as Helvetiarockt were formed, which have been fighting for more women to be present on Swiss concert stages ever since. There have already been initiatives similar to “Keychange” on the international stage: 45 pop festivals had committed to increasing the proportion of women in their event’s program to 50 percent by 2022.
Should quotas for women actually ensure the so-called gender balance at festivals in the future? Certainly not. The example of the SMA shows that it only takes a little patience, and then the situation can quickly change in favor of the musicians. The current reactions to Moon & Stars also make it clear that festivals damage their own prestige if they don’t bring women onto the stage.