MELT Festival

MELT Festival was an outdoor weekend of rock and electronic music among the excavators of Ferropolis, the open-air museum of a former lignite mine, in Gräfenhainichen, Saxony-Anhalt. The city of iron sits between Berlin and Leipzig. The promoter who closes the record is Goodlive, of Live Nation. The director who speaks in the papers is Florian Czok. People slept in a tent. The name does not go on as a weekend of its own: in May 2024 the organisers said they would not continue it after that summer.

The weekend the papers close is 11 to 13 July 2024. The ticket sheet and moz.de print those dates. The Rove guide stretches the music from Thursday evening the 11th through Sunday afternoon the 14th, and the camping from Thursday noon until 19:00 on Sunday. That clock belongs to the guide. The address moz.de prints is Ferropolisstraße 1, 06773 Gräfenhainichen. The same piece brings the Sleepless Floor back to its old place, between the grounds and the campsite, under the line One last dance. That floor had run electronic music for twenty-four hours and, moz.de writes, from 2020 it was no longer in that spot. Spiegel, on 31 May 2024, calls Ferropolis the city of excavators and sets the farewell under those machines. Before the pandemic, it writes, the figures sat around 25,000 people. IQ Magazine speaks of a 20,000 capacity. Both figures stay as they were published.

The weekend pass on the official sheet was €209.95. Rove says that pass covered the music days and the camping, with a €10 waste deposit already inside the price. The premium pass was €259.95 and, in that guide, added a shuttle between the campsite and the grounds and a separate tent area. Two nights, Friday and Saturday, were €154.95, with entry on Friday at 16:00. The twenty-four-hour ticket started at €59.95. A car or a caravan on the campsite cost €59.95. Glamping started at €699. A package with a hotel was €471. The national bus started at €20 and the international bus at €65. Rove writes that the train reaches Gräfenhainichen and that a free shuttle left the station for the grounds. The Ticketmaster blog, written before the doors, says the weekend was close to sold out and that day tickets for Thursday, Friday and Saturday would come out in the following weeks. It also prints a warm-up on Friday 10 May 2024 at ELSE, beside the S-Bahn stop at Treptower Park, the day after Ascension. A booking guide tells people to bring a tent, a sleeping mat and a head torch for the walk at night. Glamping is the bed if the tent stays at home. The machines of the museum do not move. The stages sit among them, in the open air. IQ Magazine speaks of more than 120 names on the farewell sheet. These sheets print no minimum age.

The first gathering, according to the Berliner Morgenpost, was in 1997 at the Bernsteinsee in Velten, Brandenburg. Popmonitor remembers it as a one-day rave. The second, the Morgenpost writes, was at the Lärz airfield. From 1999 the weekend stays at Ferropolis. Popmonitor adds that from 2004 the magazine Intro shapes the bill and the production. At the twentieth anniversary, detektor.fm counts seven stages on the main grounds, among them the Sleepless Floor. The same Popmonitor account places the programme between indie, electronic music and pop, an hour by motorway from Berlin.

The closing announcement is from May 2024. IQ Magazine records that they could not go on after that year, because of shifts in the festival market that no longer fitted the concept. Czok says the original Melt no longer fitted without changing it at the root. Spiegel quotes the same idea in the MDR's words: changes that could not be crossed and that no longer matched the core of the brand. In June 2025 the Berliner Zeitung talks with Magnus von Welck and Tobias Gruber. von Welck puts the end down to production costs and artist fees, and to a ticket price they did not want to raise further for fear of losing the crowd. The same team announces two parties in Berlin, under other names, Magma and Lava, for 30 and 31 August 2025, at the RSO in Oberschöneweide. The office the paper names is at Pfuelstraße 5, in Kreuzberg. These sheets bring no recap that those doors opened. The Ferropolis weekend is the one the papers do close.

The bed was a tent on the Ferropolis campsite, or a hotel bed if the package included one. The daytime path was on foot among the excavators, or on the shuttle from the station. These sheets close no other weekend under this name after 13 July 2024.