Fun Business Days 2026: What nightlife's most ambitious operators are building right now

From 300 to 3,000: Why FBD Valencia has become the industry's meeting point

Fun Business Days held its fifth edition in April at the City of Arts & Sciences in Valencia (Spain), bringing together more than 3,000 professionals from across Europe and the United States, a number that reflects the growth of an event that began just five years ago with 300 attendees.

Fun Business Days is one of the world's largest nightlife community powered by Fourvenues, designed to bring together leading figures in the nightlife industry to promote synergies and networking while professionalizing and elevating the sector. What makes it different from a traditional conference is the room itself: club owners, festival operators, booking agents, tech founders, and brand directors sitting at the same table, sharing the actual mechanics of how they run their businesses.

What the program actually covered

The sessions at FBD 2026 were structured around practical business decisions. Three themes dominated across both days.

• Building brands that outlast cycles. On the Fourvenues Stage, Rocco Veenboer, founder of Awakenings, and Tim Middelesch, its CEO, shared three decades of strategic thinking behind one of the world's most iconic techno brands, offering insight into how long-term vision and community building drive global relevance. Alongside them, Martín Ferrer, CEO of Amnesia Ibiza, unpacked five decades of reinvention, commercial strategy, and family legacy and what it actually takes to keep an iconic brand alive across generations.
• Scaling festival operations across markets. Tamás Kádár, CEO of Sziget Festival; Alek El-Kazal, Project Director of Ultra Europe; and Bernd Dicks, Co-founder and CEO of Parookaville, explored how large-scale festivals navigate different regulatory environments while maintaining consistency in production and brand experience.
• Artist management as a business ecosystem. Rachel Strassberger (Black Eyed Peas), Chris Braun (Artbat), and Cristiana Votta (Black Coffee) discussed how artist careers have evolved into multi-layered business ecosystems, combining branding, community, and diversified revenue streams.
• Technology and data as operational infrastructure. A panel featuring Jay Ahern, CSO of AFEM, Yuri Dokter, founder and CEO of DJ Monitor, and the Fourvenues' team explored the most relevant technological innovations for the sector, from artist monitoring and rights management to process automation and data analysis. The consensus was clear, operators who treat technology as a strategic layer are building faster and more resilient businesses.
• The daytime opportunity. A dedicated session explored the unprecedented boom of daytime events and how this format is redefining business models for clubs and promoters looking to diversify their offering. The practical takeaway was that daytime isn't a secondary format anymore. For operators with the right infrastructure, it's an additional revenue stream that runs on the same operational system as their core business.

I think it really gave me a lot of connections in cities all over Europe. It's perfect to meet new people.

Zep Franser

Shelter General Manager

The U.S. chapter begins

Fun Business Days Miami took place during Miami Music Week, hosted by Fourvenues Founder and CEO Alberto Centeno. With an intimate invite-only format, the gathering brought together venue and festival operators, tech founders, and industry leaders for an afternoon of conversation grounded in the realities of the business, from how technology is being implemented on the ground to the role culture and community play in building brands that last.

The program featured two in-conversation panels, including "The tech stack that runs modern venues," moderated by Shannon Herber (Wise River Consulting), with Alberto Centeno (Fourvenues), Thatcher Sammet (Laylo), Alaa Safa (LINEUP.ART), and Max Hammer (CrowdVolt).

This Miami chapter signals something broader: the conversations happening at FBD about operational structure, data ownership, technology infrastructure, and brand building are no longer specific to the European market. U.S. operators are asking the same questions, and they're looking for the same answers.

The shift the industry is actually making.

The headline from FBD 2026 it's the shift in how the most ambitious operators in the room are framing their own businesses.

Five years ago, the conversation at events like this was primarily cultural : programming, lineups, brand identity. That conversation still happens, and it matters. But what dominated FBD 2026 was operational with conversations of how to build a business that scale, how to own your customer data instead of renting it from a marketplace, how to make decisions based on real numbers instead of instinct, and how to use technology as the connective tissue between ticketing, access, POS and CRM.

The operators building the most durable businesses right now aren't doing it with a better lineup alone. They're doing it with better systems. Fourvenues exists to give every operator in this industry, from an independent club to a multi-market festival, the operational infrastructure to compete at that level.

What's next

In just five years, FBD has grown from 300 to more than 3,000 attendees, turning Valencia into the epicenter of nightlife innovation. In 2026, Valencia strengthened its role as the meeting point for thousands of professionals and brands. Miami confirmed the international appetite. The question for the industry now isn't whether to professionalize, it's how fast.

If you weren't in the room this year, the next best move is to start building the operational foundation that the operators who were in that room are already working on.