Frankfurt had everything.
Except the one who starts.

"Songs From A Room." What started in 2009 in a London living room — a few friends, quiet, no smartphone noise — became a global movement. By 2015, Sofar Sounds was running in dozens of cities worldwide. Frankfurt wasn't one of them.

In 2015 I was a business student at Goethe University Frankfurt and missed the live music scene I knew from Berlin and Hamburg. Frankfurt had concert stages. Frankfurt had the Mousonturm. Frankfurt had the Alte Oper. But what made Sofar Sounds evenings what they were just didn't exist here: complete strangers sitting in a living room, discovering three acts whose names they don't know.

You know the feeling: you live in a city that could have everything, and you notice that one specific thing is just missing.

Working backward from the end

I asked myself how I actually wanted to spend my weekends in Frankfurt. Not in general — concretely. Which evening would send me home with the feeling of having experienced something real? The answer was clear: an evening where I don't know what's coming. In a room that isn't actually a stage. With people who are there for the music, not for the drinks.

That wasn't an abstract wish, it was a design brief. If I wanted that evening, hundreds of others must want it too. And if no one was building it, I'd have to do it myself.

The real bottleneck wasn't "Frankfurt isn't musical enough." Frankfurt had everything you need: rooms, people, money, attention. What was missing was someone who starts.

Green light from London

So I flew to London, attended a few Sofar Sounds evenings, and afterwards met with Rafe Offer, one of the Sofar founders. I presented the plan for Frankfurt, and he gave the go-ahead. In spring 2015 we had official permission and support to run the format in Frankfurt.

What I actually built

What wasn't there had to be created: team, rooms, artist pipeline, audience. I didn't host — I built.

In detail: I built a small team — with videographers, photographers, bookers, and operational helpers. People who didn't come for money, but because they wanted the format as much as I did. We found rooms that had never been intended as stages: cafés, hotels, later museums, banks, private apartments. We booked international artists from Israel, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, England. Acts like Faber, TheAngelcy, or AB Syndrom played with us.

Most importantly, we brought together people who would otherwise never have been in the same room: students, artists, entrepreneurs, cultural makers. The mix was part of the promise.

What was hard

The biggest risk wasn't the format. Sofar had long since proven itself internationally. The risk was: would Frankfurt also want this format? Would people come to an evening in an unfamiliar room without a known line-up? That's trust, and trust isn't built in a single concert.

The first evenings were small. But they were real. Whoever came once came back and brought friends. That's how the audience formed: not through marketing, but through the format itself.

What it meant

For three years I built Sofar Sounds Frankfurt actively. In 2018 I moved to Berlin and handed the series to a new team. Today, almost ten years later, Sofar Sounds Frankfurt is still running.

It even survived Corona, because the foundation held. The trust the Frankfurters had built up in the brand was so strong that after the pandemic, everyone was glad to get going again.

It was never really about a concert format. It was about the question: what happens when you don't wait for someone else to start? And the principle transfers to brands, cities, structures that are only missing the first step.