2016 Strawberry Festival Tickets Now on Sale, Option to Camp For All Three Days

Early bird tickets for the 2016 Strawberry Music Festival, scheduled for April 30-May 2, went on sale today at noon. It should be a triumphant return, as you may remember, last year's festival was “postponed" due to circumstances beyond the control of Modern Sky.

That being said, the festival is already off to a bit of a weird start in that tickets are officially on sale but outlets selling the tickets are TBD.

This year the festival will take place at Grand Epoch City in Langfang City, in Hebei Province, which is about 50km from Beijing’s city center. This was also the location of last year’s INTRO Electronic Music Festival. So, at least, the venue has a little experience with hosting gaggles of music-obsessed youth. 

For the first time in the festival’s history, there is a 10,000-square-meter area, for music lovers to camp out on the premises for all three days. This sounds cool, but we can’t help but have our doubts about the logistics of such a massive undertaking. Just imagine thousands of people herded together for three days fighting over limited concessions and access to booze, phone charging stations, and other facilities. But we hope this has already been taken into consideration, and there will be enough goods on premises to satisfy everyone in attendance. 

The first big name act to be announced, at least in Shanghai as there is no word about Beijing yet, is Prodigy. That's great, and would be even better if we were still living in 1995. Strawberry usually does a good job of at least picking a couple of timely acts that can draw a big crowd. 

Finally, there will be a virtual reality theme to the event (“The world is virtual, you are the reality”) with VR broadcasting on the festival grounds, which should give the whole weekend a Lawnmower Man-vibe. The organizers will also be unveiling the country's first live music VR platform (wait, is this something that already exists?). At least they can VR in a big name foreign act if all else fails.

We'll update you as to where to actually purchase tickets (!) and who else is set to play as the info trickles in over the coming hours/day/weeks

More stories by this author here.

Email: danielkippwhittaker@thebeijinger.com

Photos: modernsky.com, thenypost.files.wordpress.com