It has been almost 20 years since the Fishing On Orfű festival was first organized, which has now clearly grown into the largest alternative light music festival in the country. While the Hungarian and international festival markets are getting worse and worse, every year all the tickets and passes are sold out in Orfű, the apartments have been lined up around the local lake, and the musicians can’t help but express their gratitude on stage about how much they love to perform here. However, the secret of Fishing on Orfű is perhaps not so complicated.
The 2010s were about the flourishing of the domestic festival market, and then the Covid came and really put everyone in the crosshairs. There is no more Old Festival, no more Balaton Sound, no Rockmarathonnot this year either Sorry, nor Colorado they don’t keep it, and the island was also returned from its foreign owners to the original founder. Everyone perceives the changes, which are not necessarily linked exclusively to Covid:
- Since the generational change in light music that became very spectacular a few years ago, the market has settled down a bit, there is no need for another wave of new performers, roughly every festival consists of the same Hungarian names;
- Festivals have become incredibly expensive, practically it is no longer possible to organize a 3-4 night festival without spending hundreds of thousands of forints;
- People go to concerts less and less to discover new music, but to see specific artists;
- For many top performers, it’s much more worthwhile to have independent parties than to spend the summer playing at various festivals;
- The FOMO effect has disappeared, going to a festival is no longer as much of a trend as it was even 10 years ago.
Of course, there are a thousand and one more reasons why the festival market is shrinking so much, but the persistent success of Fishing clearly points out that among festivals that have become more and more uniform in terms of music offer, image and experience in recent years, how can you really stand out.
Fishing On Orfű has entered the public consciousness as a subfest, since one of the founders of the event is András Lovasi (the other is Tamás Kálocz), the frontman of Kispál and Borz and Kiscsillag. Orfű developed in a pretty systematic way over the years, and kept its strong alternative identity close to Pécs in such a way that large light music festivals and events based on specific musical themes appeared almost everywhere else.
Nóra Rainer-Micinyei, András Lovasi and Gábor Leskovics at the opening of the 2026 Fishing on Orfű – Photo: Lujza Hevesi-Szabó / Telex
So much so that, in addition to Orfű, smaller festivals that do not meet the needs of the public have also grown up, such as Colorado and Bánkitó. In the meantime, Hungarian alternative guitar music was relegated to the background with the advance of hip-hop and pop, and there was a period when there were legitimate fears that the alternative music-loving audience, which is the core of Fishing, would grow old, and it would be difficult to attract young people with 20-30-year-old rock bands. While the competition tried to adapt, look sexy and sign big foreign names, Fishing held very strongly to the music world around which the audience was organized. After that, there were still a few years when it really seemed that it would be really difficult to maintain this in the long term, with the Strand, the Colorado, the Bánkitó, the Campus and other smaller and larger events.
Compared to this, in 2026 it can be easily stated that Fishing has grown into one of the most important festivals, where bands really look forward to performing. And this is precisely for what many other businesses quickly screw up: the goal is not endless growth and profit maximization at any cost, but systematic development, with which the core of the festival must be served. In recent years, the Sziget and other similar, somewhat sleazy festivals have sometimes resembled a kind of bloody capitalist nightmare, where the goal is not for the guests to have a good time, but for as many people as possible to buy tickets, and then the rest will be solved by themselves. At Sziget, too, it must always be said that when the house is really full, you don’t basically get experiences, but misery, dust, constant queuing and panic attacks. Not to mention the endless advertising and sponsorship placements.
Fishing, on the other hand, always took small steps forward. Every year they developed a little in the area (they bought it since then), more and more programs were brought out to the village and around the lake, and entrepreneurs appeared who, seeing great potential, built more and more new apartments in the area. The capacity itself reached its maximum, but the organizers did not react to this by trying to fence off new areas, but by focusing on the experience, they stopped at this number of people. This is why Fishing is a festival that can be enjoyed even on a packed day, and that is why there are no sponsors or advertisements at all, no venture capital investor crouching in front of an Excel table, demanding a 1.5 percent revenue increase by the end of the third quarter at all costs.
Photo: Lujza Hevesi-Szabó / Telex
Instead, the camping and services have been continuously improved, and since the passes sell out quickly, the organizers do not even have to enter the competition to bring the most expensive productions. By default, Fishing does not invite mainstream pop artists to the festival, and insists that it is an alternative music festival, which has long been able to accommodate hip-hop, electronica, jazz or classical music, but they do not ask for the current TikTok favorite pop singers.
For this reason, even after almost 20 years, Fishing’s identity has remained very strong, which can survive even if there is no Kispál concert (this year, let’s say, there was a point). Compared to Hungarian conditions, the audience is interested, knowledgeable and open to new music.
I’ve been to very few Hungarian festivals where the audience understood the Hungarian artists so much, where they love even those productions that, say, Budapest, can’t do more than a few hundred people.
It’s almost natural that festival-goers camping around the lake don’t hear fun or beat songs, but Hungarian alternative classics or current up-and-comers. It is no coincidence that this is the festival where the concert marquee is simply full at the concerts of Indigo or Galaxies, where the returnee gives one of the best concerts of the year. Behind God’s Backwhere the is grinning all the way Carson Coma has barely gone on stage, they are already talking about how at home they feel here. But still NKS veteran rappers sometimes only blink at how understanding and enthusiastic the audience is at Orfű, while this type of rap music is not entirely compatible with the typical Hungarian alter scene.
And then we didn’t even talk about the fact that nothing is really expensive at the level of a festival, but maybe even in Belpest, the food and drinks are at a particularly good price for an event of this size, the festival site is clean and tidy, and in more than 15 years, I have not seen a single fight, vomiting in a coma or a crowd scene resembling a disco accident. Meanwhile, the area itself is exciting, you can easily get lost between the locations, you can always find something new, and in return, you can walk around the whole place relatively quickly.
This closeness to people, which seems almost a curiosity in experiential capitalism, seems to be paying off. Fishing On Orfű is apparently one of the most stable events of its kind in the country, without the need for government funding, attracting new investors or sponsorships. To feel that an audience is somehow concentrated here that gets exactly what it wants, and neither side really wants anything else or much more. In the meantime, the organizers are making the place more and more child-friendly (in fact, they have been holding a family children’s festival here since last year), they are paying more and more attention to not promoting excessive alcohol consumption, and to ensure that vendors do not ask HUF 6-7,000 for a gyro plate just because they could do it anyway.
Photo: Lujza Hevesi-Szabó / Telex
Fishing On Orfű is still the showcase example in the festival market of what it’s like when they insist on keeping a very strong identity. You don’t need to drag out influencers for false publicity, you don’t need to repackage the same thing with neck-twisting marketing nonsense, but you just have to reach for classic moves like having big comebacks (HS7, Isten Háta Mögött, Kistehén) perform, and let András Lovasi play with one of his bands, because the people are already used to it and even expect it a little. If it is possible to sell every single ticket every year, then there is no need to radically change it.
Fishing very much seems to be one of the last lads on the festival circuit. While panic reigns almost everywhere in the event sector, the winning formula in Orfű is that people relax by the lake during the day, party to Hungarian bands in the evening, and want to do exactly the same next year.
