Follow-Me Powers Farewell Concert For Hov1

Swedish hip-hop group Hov1 closed out a decade-long career with a record-breaking farewell concert at Gärdet in Stockholm at the end of summer 2025, drawing a crowd of 52,236 fans and setting a new record for the city’s largest outdoor concert audience.

The performance surpassed the previous attendance record established by Metallica in 2014.

Central to the show's production was the deployment of Follow-Me's manual performer tracking system, used by lighting designer Jonathan Rikner alongside system technician Edvard Hansson and keylight operator Fredrik Jönsson.

Formed in 2015, Hov1 released seven studio albums during its career, all of which reached number one on the Swedish Albums Chart. The group also achieved 42 top-10 singles, including 16 chart-toppers. Their farewell tour across July and August 2025 culminated in the landmark Stockholm performance.

Rikner said the decision to use Follow-Me was based on both technical reliability and creative flexibility.

"I specifically chose Follow-Me as the other systems doing similar things aren't as flexible," he explained. "That's what makes Follow-Me stand out."

The system enabled dynamic lighting effects throughout the concert, including moments that combined contrasting lighting tones to heighten the atmosphere.

"There were a few good moments in the show that really stood out," Rikner added. "One of those was when we combined a beautiful cold silhouette with a nice, warm atmosphere from the front. That feeling and those pictures were something else."

The Follow-Me 3D SIX System was supplied by Creative Technology Sweden and distributed by Topstage. The production featured 12 Robe iForte LTX fixtures positioned around the large outdoor venue, with some fixtures located as far as 70 metres from the stage.

Hansson oversaw the system calibration process, using data exported from Vectorworks and drone-assisted alignment to account for the uneven terrain at the open-air site.

"This workflow makes it easy to add plenty of extra reference data, which often becomes useful later in the process," said Hansson.

He said the system’s performance at long distances was particularly notable.

"For me, it was how well the system aligned with fixtures hung as far as 70 metres away from the stage," he said. "The accuracy at that distance was genuinely impressive. The ability to use as many fixtures as you want, and to treat virtually any fixture as a follow spot, is a gamechanger. That flexibility is a huge advantage when designing for large-scale shows."

The production team opted for a fully manual tracking approach during the concert, allowing operators to focus entirely on following the performers on stage.

"At first, I spent some time briefing the Follow-Me operators on how the system worked and supervised them closely for the initial run," Hansson said. "Once they understood the workflow, they were able to handle it confidently, which freed me up to focus on the bigger picture."

Despite the scale and complexity of the show, Hansson said the technology performed without issue throughout setup and the concert itself.

"The system performed very reliably," Hansson added. "No issues during setup or the show itself. It did exactly what we needed it to do."

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