David Hajdečka closes Metronome Prague festival after ten years

The founders of the Metronome Prague music festival, David Hajdečka and Martin Vonka, have announced that after ten years the project is closing down — there will be no eleventh edition in 2027. The reason is simple and painful: the festival never found enough spectators or long-term partners able to secure its financial stability.

The final, tenth-anniversary festival took place this past June at the former airport grounds in Prague's Letňany district, where the event had moved after leaving the Exhibition Centre. Sting, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tom Odell, Lykke Li, Manic Street Preachers and The Flaming Lips performed on three stages. Despite the star-studded line-up, attendance never reached the tens of thousands of spectators that concerts in Letňany usually draw, according to the Czech News Agency (ČTK).

The organisers admitted that in recent years the festival had been complicated by residents' complaints about evening concerts and the night-time programme, as well as the general mood in Prague. “We received a certain amount of support from Prague City Hall from the very beginning, but it wasn't enough to keep developing the event,” Hajdečka and Vonka said. According to them, they failed to meet the agreements and goals without which organising such an international event in the capital is simply impossible.

The project's closure comes just a year after Metronome Prague announced a partnership with the concert agency Live Nation Czech Republic — a collaboration meant to give the festival a firmer footing, international experience and the chance to expand its programme and venue. At the time, 2026 was billed as the start of the project's second decade. But even that partnership failed to secure the conditions for the festival to continue.

Funding had been a pressing issue before as well. Back in 2022, Hajdečka told Forbes that the budget of the festival, revived after the pandemic, stood at 80 million korunas: about 40% was meant to be covered by ticket sales and 30% by sponsorship deals, though the sponsorship targets were not met that year. The city of Prague and the Ministry of Culture each gave the festival 2.8 million korunas that same year.

Metronome Prague was founded in 2016 and over the years brought artists such as Iggy Pop, Alanis Morissette, Kraftwerk, Beck and Jamiroquai to the Czech capital. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted its development for several years and, according to the organisers, caused the project serious financial losses, delaying its path to profitability.

Still, the Metronome brand will not disappear from the music scene entirely: Hajdečka and Vonka say they are already preparing new concert events. Instead of a single festival weekend, they plan to hold events on different dates throughout the year. Details have not yet been disclosed.

By the Around Prague newsroom