Free online festival to entertain youth on New Year’s Eve

The New Year will be celebrated online this year in the Netherlands with the Goodbye 2020 Festival. The event is dedicated to young adults who are not able to go out and meet friends this year due to social restrictions, NOS reports.

Nearly 250 primarily Dutch artists, such as Carista, Dopebwoy and Yellow Claw are participating. From 4 p.m. on New Year’s Eve to 5 a.m. the following day, the audience can choose amongst roughly forty different streaming channels which artist they want to celebrate 2021 with. In total that is around 200 hours in performance time.

The event will be hosted by Snelle, de Lieve Jongens Band and Fedde Le Grand, amongst others. Viewers can interact with one another via the platform.

The initiative comes from Maarten Schulz from the festival platform Follow the Beat. It is supported by the government with one million euros in funding. How many viewers will tune in is hard to guess, but Schulz estimates the number to be around 500,000.

“Normally, I am also not the biggest fan of streams because live everything is better. But this year everything is different”, so Schulz to NOS. “Everything is closed. You cannot meet up. We hope, therefore, to create a nice experience together with the artists.”

The national crisis communication team, NCTV, is very pleased with the idea because it gives the youth an alternative to celebrate the holiday during the lockdown while at the same time, giving artist’s a stage to perform on.

“In this way, we give a helping hand to a distressed sector. It is aimed at the youth and it is also online, so it contributes to staying home within the measures.”

Registration is free and can be done via this website.