Why People Will Appreciate Your Honesty If You're Good What You Do

She's one of the newest members of the team responsible for booking the incredible line-ups which make Denmark's Roskilde Festival the biggest such bash in Europe, and Kim Ambrosius explains how she got the gig via a combination of immersing herself in music she loves, but also keeping an eye on the bigger picture.

"I've been writing for a Danish music blog for five to six years, and then later I just started doing promotion in Copenhagen, and I think all of that got me on the radar of the bookers for Roskilde," she explains. "Copenhagen is tiny and I met one of the Roskilde team and had a long chat - I met him at South By Southwest as well - and then last year he called me and asked me if I wanted to come to the festival and work as an observer. All of the bookers would put down bands that they wanted me to see but weren't sure they could actually make it, which meant daily meetings with them all to discuss what I'd seen the day before - it was very objective but still with a very subjective spin to it.

"You just can't book any obscure band you like, you have to constantly have in mind not only the festival but also the people that attend it."

"I'd tell them how many people were there, if the time of day was right, if the stage was right and stuff like that, and then I'd always give my own opinion on that booking and what I thought could have been better. It's hard when you really love an act to not be subjective at some point, but I think they appreciated that I had opinions but was also very humble to the fact that Roskilde is so big that you just can't book any obscure band you like, you have to constantly have in mind not only the festival but also the people that attend it."

From this already enviable position things just kept getting better for Ambrosius. "After the festival they invited me to do an evaluation day where they asked for my opinion and I really just got to tell them what I thought," she continues. "Then about a month later they called me and said, 'We're really impressed about how much you know about underground stuff but we feel that you also have Roskilde and it's ideologies in the back of your head.' They asked me if I wanted to be involved during the year, which meant that they invited me to a couple of festivals in Europe where I'd help scope out bands, then later a woman who'd been part of the booking group doing the smaller alternative and indie acts was leaving and they asked me to take her place!

"We decide all of the acts for Roskilde so we're constantly emailing back and forth and it's a matter of keeping my list of interesting bands that I think could be viable updated to contribute to the conversation."