While nearly 40,000 spectators flocked to My Dinh Stadium to cheer Korean boyband Super Junior, the three-day Hanoi Sound Stuff Festival attracted just several hundreds of people nightly.

Disadvantaged children performed at the festival (photo: Tuoi Tre).

Jazz musician Tri Minh, who initiated the program, remarked that: “The number of tickets on sale and the audience sizes are beyond our expectations. Vietnamese audiences are too shy to new genres of music. They seem to be familiar only with pop music.”

With a full schedule over three days, both indoors and outdoors at Hanoi’s Giang Vo Exhibition Centre, as well as the participation of 80 artists from 16 countries, Hanoi Sound Stuff is a very big event.

Half of the audience each night was not Vietnamese, but expats and tourists. The festival aimed to bring awareness of environment protection, but after each show, the organizing board had to mobilize up to 200 students to collect rubbish.

Though audience numbers were modest, artists still played hard. They had sympathy for the organizers (Vietnam National Conservatory of Music and the M.A.M Cultural Production and Development) because the electronic music festival has existed in Vietnam for only three years.

Tri Minh disclosed: “After the festival, artists from Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, China and the US committed to join this festival in 2011. I also committed myself to this program for five more years. After five years, if the audience is still not interested, we will change the format or end the festival.”

VietNamNet/Tuoi Tre