Superstruct Wrote a Code for What Artists Can Say Onstage. It Says Nothing About Who Owns the Company.

Superstruct Entertainment owns or co-owns more than 80 festivals: Sonar, Awakenings, Dekmantel, Wacken Open Air, Sziget, Flow, Mighty Hoopla, Boardmasters, Field Day and dozens more across Europe. On September 10, 2026, it published a company-wide "Artistic Code", its first formal, public answer to 18 months of artist boycotts and onstage protests tied to owner KKR's Israel-linked business interests since the private-equity firm bought a majority stake in 2024.

What does the code actually say?

The code commits Superstruct to "protecting artistic freedom within the law" and states plainly that the company does "not censor or editorially control performances to ensure alignment with our group values." It sets out two "absolute red lines" instead: content that puts visitor or staff safety at risk, including anything that could incite dangerous crowd behaviour or target a group in a way that is discriminatory or could lead to violence, and content or speech that is illegal in the country where a given festival operates, the example given being expressed support for a proscribed organisation.

COO Rebecca Kane Burton said the company decided to make the document public "because we want to share what we've learned and contribute positively to the wider industry conversation," framing it as guidance Superstruct's 80-plus festivals can lean on when a booking or a performance becomes a flashpoint.

Why do critics call the red lines blurred?

The problem, as Complete Music Update's Chris Cooke laid out, is that Superstruct's own red lines are the exact categories boycott campaigns already use to argue for pulling artists. When Bob Vylan led "death, death to the IDF" chants from a festival stage, critics called it discriminatory and violence-inciting speech, precisely Superstruct's first red line, even though police investigations produced no charges. When Kneecap faced allegations of expressing support for a proscribed organisation, that is Superstruct's second red line almost verbatim, even though the criminal case against the group collapsed over a prosecutorial error. A code meant to protect performers from being pulled for their politics uses language that a promoter, or a pressure campaign, could just as easily point at those same performers to justify pulling them.

The code addresses political expression onstage. It does not address why artists started boycotting Superstruct festivals in the first place: KKR's own investments.

That is the gap campaigners are pointing to. Individual festivals under the Superstruct umbrella have already tried to put daylight between themselves and their owner, some publicly distancing their own programming from KKR while voicing support for Palestinian causes. The Artistic Code formalises a stance on what performers can say onstage. It says nothing about who owns the stage, which is the complaint that started this.

What happens next?

Superstruct now has a written policy it can point to the next time a booking becomes a flashpoint, a genuine change from the ad hoc handling of the Bob Vylan and Kneecap situations. Whether that policy cools the boycott movement or hands campaigners a new document to pick apart line by line is the open question the code itself doesn't answer.