Since they never organized an event with their own money and didn't know how to promote an event that didn’t sell, ÄŒrt Batagelj and Matej Ahlin (now the promoters of Tolminator) decided to create bad publicity for MetalDays, creating conflict within the community. The goal was to save their event by making a portion of our visitors decide to go there instead of MetalDays.
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If one puts enough blood, sweat, and tears into a new festival, it will find its visitors. It takes time, but eventually, it will happen. There is no shortcut to that. Being passionate about your own festival is crucial, but deliberately going after the festival that gave you all the relevance you have, and targeting the people you shared drinks and laugh with just a few days ago, making it that personal, is not only cowardly but also pathologically ill. They collaborated with various internet trolls, including Slovenian journalist Mitja Birt, who is their friend, to generate negative publicity for MetalDays and us personally. Sadly, we now live in a time where one is considered guilty until proven innocent. As a result, we were publicly found guilty of something we haven’t done. But one is only guilty if found guilty in a real court, not the court of public opinion. It’s hard to believe that a newspaper like Delo can publish such articles that are based on no evidence at all. Even harder to believe that editor-in-chief Bojan Budja would approve it. In all honesty, we are still amazed that we’re that popular. Wars nearby, refugees, food insecurities, financial, living, and energy crises, and we get a double page in a major Slovenian newspaper. Not once, but twice. You can’t make that up.
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Fabricating lies is something that always comes with a price. Almost every new festival needs at least five years to break even, which in this case is another irony. Imagine doing all they did to be able to organize the festival only until 2027, naming the festival after a town that doesn’t want them. As you may know, the Tolmin major announced not long ago that they are going to tolerate festivals in Tolmin only until 2027. Those still asking us why MetalDays didn’t stay there in a smaller version, now you may understand. The solution to this is to rename the festival to Trollminator after 2027. Besides being a great fit, this would make it possible to keep the party going elsewhere.
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Promoters of the Tolminator festival, ÄŒrt Batagelj and Matej Ahlin, are not the friends of the Metal community they claim to be, nor do they care about MetalDays visitors' refunds. Having lived on taxpayers' money for a long time, their only concern is their own self-interest. While they spread lies about us to promote their own business, they are in partnership with Marko Vraz and Danica Badovinec of Amaia Esa d.o.o., the very individuals actually holding your refund money. You should google Disini, Lombok.
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COVID-19, subsequent lockdowns, and an economic downturn made it impossible to organize the festival without raising ticket prices for the 2023 edition. Unfortunately, this didn’t sit well with many visitors. This, along with moving to the new location, the frustration caused by not fulfilling the refund promise, and the production-wise not so good 2022 edition, resulted in sales similar to our first edition. To create the best possible festival experience for our visitors at our new location, we decided to allocate more money to the lineup than usual. While we can confidently say that the MetalDays lineup of 2023 was one of the best of that summer, we now realize that this wasn’t the wisest decision. We forgot that MetalDays isn’t about the lineup; it’s about the Metal family feeling that was lost but we were too ignorant to understand that. Not putting extra effort into reuniting our community was a huge mistake. No matter how overworked we were because of all the complications with the new venue, we should have known better.
Despite the excessive spending, the 2023 festival would not have incurred such a loss if it weren't for the flooding. Instead, with money from the 2024 pre-sale, we would have been able to cover all 2023 production expenses, including bands. As we would be unable once again to refund those who have been waiting already way too long for their refunds, we can only imagine the outburst of frustration on social media. So, what happened was maybe for the better. Flooding not only produced additional expenses, it also influenced visitors not to buy tickets for the upcoming year. They were happy to come back home alive. We understand not many wished to buy tickets for next year immediately after such a traumatic experience. With being flooded in a natural catastrophe that is historic for Slovenia, our excitement with the new location at Lake Velenje was short-lived. If we could survive this financially, we believe this unfortunate event would create such a strong bond between visitors and the people of Velenje that it would have a positive outcome in the end. However crazy this may sound. Unfortunately, promised state aid still didn’t arrive, and this edition lived to be our last one.