Twelve Years In, What Can the World's Biggest Electronic Music Festival Actually Bring This Small Town?

It could have been a small bomb dropped on a sleeping town. Instead, everyone here is working to tamp down the "fairy-tale" notion that the festival will remake the place.

Boom is a small town in northern Belgium. People speak Dutch day to day, and French as well, and because the ground here holds clay, the town is full of brick factories.

Aynsley started working at a bar in Boom six years ago. On an ordinary day the bar is dead quiet — "and the whole town is empty too." But on one weekend each summer, the crowds appear out of nowhere. "I honestly can't count how many people have come through the bar in these three days!" Aynsley shouted outside the bar on July 24. "Normally I barely speak English. These three days I'm practicing it nonstop, because people come from every country."

Credit the bar's address: it sits right beside the entrance to Tomorrowland (TML from here on), the world's biggest electronic music festival. Twelve years ago the festival landed, by luck, in the Schorre district of Boom. In its first year the town took in 8,000 people from around the world, and the number has climbed every year since. This year 60,000 came, from more than 200 countries. Budweiser, the festival's biggest sponsor, flew in three full planeloads from China by itself.

They stream past the bar and into the main grounds, where a DJ is working the crowd from the stage, and then the "earthquake" starts. Pressed into the middle of a crowd that size, it's hard not to jump. When you jump, the beer in your hand slops onto the ground, sometimes onto you, and you don't care. To hear the person beside you, you have to put your ear against them — though most of the time there's nothing to say. You beat time with your hands, or climb onto someone's shoulders.

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The festival could have been a small bomb dropped on the town.

Boom, a place nobody has heard of, has fewer than 20,000 residents and covers one-seventeenth the area of Macau. Sixty thousand people a day is as much as it can take. "Divide the total land area by the number of people and you get how much room each person has to stand in. Put too many people in one spot and they suffocate," says Alex Ternier, who manages the Schorre district where the festival is held.

That makes the ticket scramble worse: this year's tickets, at around 400 euros, sold out in five minutes. "Ten of us electronic-music fans went for tickets at the same moment, and I was the only lucky one. I ordered ten, and my hands were shaking as I typed in my credit card details, because one wrong digit and it was over," says Dragos, a fan on the grounds. This is Dragos's second trip to Boom for TML, but the young Romanian says he "doesn't really know this place."

Dragos is staying in the tent camp pitched on site. The buses that bring these excited young people from Brussels or Antwerp happen to skirt the town center completely.

If he did wander into town on a whim, he would find that this place, host to twelve editions of the world's biggest electronic music festival, looks close to a ghost town.

For the people who fly in from everywhere, TML and Boom have been entirely separate since the festival's first few years. The town's deepest impression on them may be nothing more than the big hole the main grounds sit in.

A hundred years ago this was flat land, and the town was known for red brick. The clay dug out to make those bricks for export left a big hole and a slope on the town's eastern edge.

Nobody expected a spot where children played hide-and-seek to make the perfect festival site. The main grounds are laid out like a stadium concert: the main stage sits at the bottom of the hole, ringed by a slope, so everyone on the slope can see the stage clearly, and there are plants and running water right beside it. Alex Ternier, who manages the district, is proud of this. "All of it gives TML a fairy-tale feeling, an unreal feeling," he says.

At first that "fairy-tale feeling," together with a few key words — young, friendly, open, energetic — won the quiet town over.

It won over Natalie, a Muslim girl. The three days of the festival are the three days she looks forward to all year. She is not yet 18 and can't go in, and she is satisfied anyway, "because I like seeing the street full of people. During the festival last year I just sat outside, and people came up to talk to me, asked where I was from, whether I liked the music, where the train station was... I'd never seen so many people on the street. I was so excited."

Daisy catches the same sudden rush of young energy, but she has more to worry about. She runs a shop in the center of Boom selling sandwich meats and condiments, a business her father started. "Every year, the TML weekend is my worst sales weekend of the year," Daisy says. Over the three days this year her sales fell another 50% from the same weekend last year. She hasn't even seen the buses carrying TML's passengers, because they loop around Boom, avoid the center and drive straight into TML.

The mayor, Jeroen Baert, thinks you can't have it both ways: a town of fewer than 20,000 people cannot realistically absorb 180,000 into its center in three days. At the same time, "a lot of people get off at Boom's train station, and we have to get them to TML by the shortest route. The bus takes five minutes. If you made them walk it could take one or two hours," Jeroen Baert explains.

Those arrangements spared the town the "devastating blow" of the early years. Back then people coming for TML could still walk into town, and in the experience of the mayor and other officials, "our supermarket sold out within five minutes, and half the people walked out without paying. You can't control that many people."

Daisy, though, finds something harder to bear than chaos: being ignored. "I feel like my little shop is stranded on a tiny island. Nobody knows about me, nobody comes, because everything is happening over there, inside TML. My regular customers don't come during the TML weekend either. Why? Because it's too hard to get here. There's someone posted on every road, and roads get closed."

The moment this year's festival ended she couldn't help calling the organizers for help, and got a noncommittal answer: "Let's see what we can do."

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Patrick, a town resident, thinks TML has no intention of looking after local small traders like Daisy. If you are lucky enough to get to TML you can stay in the tent camp the festival runs, but it holds only 25,000 people. To cover three days of their needs the camp has more than a dozen shops inside it — hair washing, tea, makeup, electronics, a bakery, a supermarket — plus a new food-truck zone this year, so nobody has to leave the camp to buy anything. But as Patrick puts it, only "companies with big money can open a shop in the camp and supply it."

In fact TML did invite the town's shops in. For its tenth anniversary in 2014 the organizers started a project called Love Our Neighbors. Part of it was a letter to every business in town, encouraging them to rent a stall in the camp.

In the end, Esthel Rams, who sells jewelry in town, was the only one willing to try. "Of course I had to pay a fee. I can't tell you how much, but it wasn't small. I got something back, though. It's like an investment."

Esthel Rams's jewelry shop has been open in town for 55 years. Like other shops here with some age on them, she took it over from her father, and now runs it with her younger brother. The first year she set up in the camp, passersby thought it was odd — "someone's selling jewelry here?!" This July was her third time opening a stall there, and the bracelets she designed with the TML logo sold out. "We make 500 of each style at most. We're a small family business — we couldn't finish thousands."

This year a couple got married at the TML camp, and Esthel supplied the rings. How it started sounds a little mystical: "I dreamed that someone got married at TML wearing rings I'd made, so I called TML and told them my idea." The organizers agreed to put photos of Esthel's rings and her contact details on social media, and the orders came in. Two couples last year, one this year, and the wedding was packed with reporters from every country — "as lively as a princess's wedding."

It all sounds fine, but what TML actually adds to Esthel's sales is small. In the camp she can only sell silver; ordinarily she sells mostly gold. "It's for safety too — there's no way I'd take millions' worth of stock over there." How big is the gap? A silver TML-logo bracelet goes for 40 euros; the gold and diamond rings she normally sells go for 4,000. The contribution really is small. But whenever people bring up a resident who worked with the festival and made it work, Esthel's name comes up again and again, from neighbors and even the mayor. She has become a local figure.

Even so, few plan to follow her. One reason others haven't gone looking for a deal like Esthel Rams's is that jewelry may be the easiest thing to move. Daisy, who runs the meat shop in town, would like to work with TML too, but she worries about handling a crowd that size — "I don't know what to make, how much to sell, how many people would buy." She has no idea. On top of that she would have to sort out transport and refrigeration. For a small shop all of it is too hard, and a solution isn't easy to find.

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In Boom, Daisy and Esthel still count as lucky: the shops they inherited from their parents are at least still open, while most shops that ran for decades have closed. TML pays the town 2 euros in tax per ticket each year — about 120,000 euros at 60,000 attendees — and even that hasn't kept Boom from emptying out further, with no sign of stopping.

Kristine, who runs a bag shop on Boom's main street, remembers that 50% of the shops have closed over the years; five buildings stand empty on this street alone. The mayor puts it down to an awkward location. "We're too close to Antwerp [Belgium's second-largest city], and we're close to the highway, so a lot of people would rather drive to Antwerp. It's 15 kilometers, and you can buy anything there." Big-city malls offer more choice and maybe a discount too, the mayor says; a small shop has no advantage and nowhere to grow.

On this point the town's residents seem to agree with their mayor: there is nothing here to draw people, and no prospect of that changing. "You haven't seen what our town is like normally. It's just empty, because there's really nothing to do here," Natalie says.

Most of Boom's shops are family-run, besides, and children today don't want to keep shop. Daisy's daughter is put off by her mother's trade: "Mom, what you sell has such a strong smell, it smells awful, I don't like it." What does the daughter want to do? Travel the world.

"Young people all want a nine-to-five. Keeping a shop is hard. You're working the whole time, no rest, open from 10am until 6 or 8 at night. Closing up doesn't mean the work is done — then there's the books, the cleaning, the restocking," Kristine says. Her shop has been open 27 years, six days a week, holidays included.

To survive, Kristine has worked harder these last few years than ever. To pull in younger customers she set up the shop's Instagram account six months ago and started on Facebook two years ago; she has to keep up. She doesn't like shopping in the big city, and she believes she offers the personal service the big malls can't. "A lot of people bought their school bags from me when they were children, and now they bring their own children here for bags... Take something to a big mall for repair and the first thing they ask is whether you have the receipt. It isn't like that with me. I'll do everything I can for my customers."

Sales at Kristine's shop haven't grown over the past three years, but they haven't fallen either, and she is happy with that. "The way the crisis is now, I might be one of the lucky ones."

The sense of crisis has soaked into daily life here. After years of slump, and the price rises that came with the euro's arrival in Belgium, this year even the community park's swimming pool couldn't stay open. It is fenced off with iron railings, weeds all around it, the water full of fallen leaves and dust.

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Alex Ternier was once the person most convinced TML could turn the town around. He counts off the small changes of the past years: TML and Antwerp province, which Boom belongs to, built a bridge together, splitting the cost. The bridge is in use all year now, not just to move festival traffic. TML also helped widen roads and lay paving stones.

But on the subject of the town's undeveloped tourism, he is all complaint.

He remembers the cold shoulder he got when he first went to Boom's town hall. "I have all those emails back and forth, I can show you. They say: 'About that music festival business, you have to stop this immediately!'" It took a few years to convince the mayor and his team, and Alex thinks what finally moved the mayor was the rising public revenue TML brought in. "Once they saw what TML could earn them, they gave in."

But they never believed the town could really change in any lasting way beyond something like a bridge. Drive a whole local economy with one festival or one project? "Come on," says Jeroen Baert, a little irritated by such unrealistic plans for remaking the town. The town could open hotels for TML, he counters, but for the other 360-odd days a year those hotels would be ornaments. Jeroen Baert also runs a law firm; he is a part-time mayor.

Alex, the district manager, can do even less. When he proposed that several neighboring towns join forces to build a new museum and make the area more attractive to tourists, nobody — no surprise — thought it was a good idea.

In Boom, Belgium, the odds of a festival powering fast growth are probably genuinely slim. The biggest problem is money. Because government and business keep each other at arm's length, the kind of state-led investment drive familiar elsewhere simply doesn't happen in this European town. Boom has no real budget to speak of; the festival brought in an extra 120,000 euros or so this year, a trivial sum against the cost of a transformation anyone actually committed to.

Jeroen Baert also has a handful of objectors to manage. The town's socialist party opposes TML outright and wants the mayor to talk to residents directly and ask what they think. One of their arguments is noise and traffic. Two years ago eight residents took TML to court and lost, because the judge found TML had followed every rule: decibels under 100, a 1am finish, all the permits in hand.

The other argument is that "the people nearby think of it as their private garden. They want to walk their dogs in the park whenever they like, and if you change that they're unhappy." These objectors aren't only against TML; they're against any event held on that land at any point in the year.

"But is that a reason to fight TML? I don't think so. If you look at the economic results — not just for Boom, but for Antwerp province, Brussels province, for the whole of Belgium — you have to think further ahead. There are other interests in this game," the mayor says, carefully.

To capture as much of the economic gain as possible without risking upheaval, the mayor has decided to try again what TML did for its tenth anniversary: a festival across two weekends. The math favors it — two weekends return more on the same investment than one. "During the festival we have 5,000 to 7,000 staff a day, and that's before the police, the fire service, the medical cover, all of which costs a lot of money. With two weekends the return is bigger, and you don't have to build anything new," Alex says, sounding as though he now understands his friend the mayor.

For TML, Schorre and Boom, two weekends might suit everyone. Maybe that swimming pool, forced shut, can reopen next year.

Outside those two weeks, though, Aynsley looks out from the bar and sees the same ghost town.

Cover image from: Budweiser