The most profound transition in the recent history of British pop, rock and dance festivals is the increase in their number. There were no more than 12 festivals listed on eFestivals at the turn of the millennium, compared to 530 listed in 2008 (Mintel 2008).1 That year, both industry and academia had observed a post-millennial boom in festival startups, with one report showing a growth rate of 71 per cent (Anderton 2008, 39–40). This upward trajectory continued and, in 2014, eFestivals was listing upwards of 1,000 outdoor festival events. These may seem astonishing figures, by any measure – yet it is little wonder, given the strengthening of powers to prevent free festivals in the 1990s (cf. the 1994 Criminal Justice Act), that the subsequent decade would see a rise in licensed activity. Easing the bureaucracy involved in starting small was also a boon to the scene: the introduction of the temporary events notice (TEN) in 2003 simplified the process of staging small festivals of 500 patrons or less. These shifts in enforcement and licensing must be considered, however, alongside the commercial and socio-economic transitions that have influenced the size and style of the culture as a whole. Of crucial significance is the post-millennial re-distribution of value across recorded music and the live show, the fragmentation of the festivals market into niche categories, and the sweeping drive of commercialization that has successfully ‘upsold’ the festival experience.
Clearly, the range of outdoor music festivals staged in Britain today ascertains that they cannot be attributed to finite periods of youthful hedonism, for they have diversified to appeal to an impressive range of ages and tastes. The sector has developed into a big business which, in terms of public expenditure, has overtaken other music industries: as the number of festivals grew in the 2000s, consumer spend on tickets to outdoor festivals met spending on tickets to stadium gigs. By 2011, festivals were responsible for 25 per cent of the £1.6 billion spent on live music (£397 million), while stadium events also occupied 25 per cent (£396 million);2 this is up from 19 per cent for festivals and 11 per cent for arenas of a £1.45 billion market in 2009 (PRS 2011). A micro-economy of infrastructure, food and technical suppliers, as well as creative practitioners, developed around the festival circuit as small businesses exploited the commercial opportunities the sector had to offer. By the summer of 2010, PRS for Music – the UK copyright collection society and performance rights organization – had launched proceedings to raise the royalty payments charged to the live music sector, much to the dismay of organizers. The festival sector successfully challenged this ‘money-grabbing exercise’ – as it was described by Reading promoter Melvin Benn (Smithers 2010) – yet the move by PRS signalled a challenging landscape: there were reduced revenues from recordings (dropping to £1.1 billion in 2011, 3 per cent lower than 2010) amidst a proliferating, but by no means secure, live music scene (PRS 2011). In the face of rising costs and increased competition, some festival promoters intensively marketed artisan food, premium camping options and branded merchandise: by 2012, average domestic festival-goer spend was estimated at £396 while those who travelled to the UK to attend a festival from abroad spent a sizeable £910 (Government Report, Wish You Were Here, 2013). That year, the collective contribution of UK music festivals to the economy was £846 million (Virtual Festivals 2012), while the spend by AIF member festival-goers between 2010 and 2014 is estimated to be approximately £1.01 billion (Webster 2014). These economic gains, impossible to ignore by the British government, have accelerated the acceptance of the festival sector as a legitimate, even conventional, form of entertainment. Indeed, the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is a regular at Cornbury Festival, while Prince Harry has attended Glastonbury at least once (Telegraph 2014). Among many local residents and local authorities, the view that festivals are dissonant expressions of the counterculture has been at least partially replaced by an acknowledgement of their economic, if not always their social, value.
This acceptance is, in part, a natural result of the scene’s persistence over time. That Britain has the richest festival history of any country in the world is a view often expressed during my interviews with festival organizers. They may have been somewhat overly patriotic on the subject, though they were right in highlighting that British festivals are the progression of a defined and internationally recognized heritage. As Chapter 2 explained, the foundation for the contemporary scene was laid down as far back as the 1950s, and it grew with each generation as tastes shifted from jazz, blues and folk to rock, pop and dance. This legacy is a living history, with two major music festivals launched prior to 1980 still staged annually today – Reading (launched as Reading Rock Festival in 1976) and Glastonbury (launched 1970). To entrepreneurs considering a new venture, their longevity has inspired the possibility of workable, and adaptable, formats. Glastonbury’s mixed performing arts programme and environmentalist ethos, and Reading’s rock-focused and self-constructed rebellious brand of hedonistic release, represent two contrasting models (Anderton 2011, 154). Impressed by the example of sustainable, financial success that historic music festivals represent, many promoters attempt to mimic their blueprints, and to build upon the tradition in new ways. Established festivals, broadcast across national media including the BBC, not only provide crucial visibility, but have also strengthened the market at large in direct ways as associated crews have honed the skills necessary for setting up their own shows or event-based services. In a personal interview in 2014, senior manager of the Association of Independent Festivals Claire O’Neill stated:
The influence of Glastonbury is a big factor. It’s been going for 40 years. There are entire generations who have grown up going to Glastonbury; it’s one of the biggest festivals in the World in our country. That’s permeated through and given people the skills and inspirations to do it themselves.
Described in 2012 as the ‘world’s most famous music festival’ by the government minister Ed Vaizey, that year, Glastonbury was estimated to contribute in excess of £100 million to the UK economy annually (Wish You Were Here, 2013). With a portion of this figure regularly supporting traders, suppliers and production services, Glastonbury has helped provide a financial platform for contributors who have gone on to supply other festivals. For four decades it has acted as a Petri dish for the development of event services, creative and practical – including entire festivals which have been launched off the back of it. Glade, billed as the first music festival devoted entirely to electronic music, began as a dance enclave within Glastonbury’s wooded intersection, an area that remains sited there to this day. Glade ran between 2004 and 2012, and while tickets to the festival slowed down considerably towards the end of its lifespan, it was an important event in fostering what was then a marginal, underground dance scene. The Big Green Gathering, held between 1994 and 2007 (and re-launched in 2011 as the Green Gathering) drew upon collectives that produced the Green Fields at Glastonbury’s site, recreating the atmosphere with a focus on permaculture, campaigns, craft and ecology. Similarly, the solar-powered Croissant Neuf Summer Party in Monmouthshire, launched in 2007, was an independent recreation of the Croissant Neuf Field at Glastonbury, a staple of the festival for almost 30 years.
Crucial to the wider scene is the conspicuous performing arts format that Glastonbury has grown to represent. Many music festivals today emulate the mixed programming of Glastonbury, an approach that has become a solid requirement for events positioned within the ‘boutique’ sector (a trend discussed in the following chapter).3 It has provided a conspicuous template for many of the multi-sensory facets of the festival experience: socially aware campaigns, vegetarian, organic and world cuisine, workshops and decor, and hare-brained, nuanced art forms. In this sense, it has set the bar high with its performing arts model, something that has not only inspired festival startups but also helped to form the criteria upon which they are judged. It has also had a more tangible effect on the industry at large, according to some sources: its extensive media coverage boosting ticket sales to festivals across the nation, ‘push[ing] the festival concept into the national consciousness’ in a process described as the ‘Glastonbury effect’ (Webster 2014).
Within a relatively short period of time, festivals of the 2000s were now competing for a growing, though not inexhaustible, number of live music fans. For some smaller festival promoters, however, competing with Glastonbury or Reading was far less important than competing with another local music festival, only 45 minutes drive away. The breadth of the independent industry was marked by the formation of the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF, hereafter) in 2008, which functioned primarily as an information-sharing exchange, and by 2014, the economic contribution of its member festivals was calculated at an estimated £296 million (Music Business Worldwide, 2015). Grouping together in this way had several strategic advantages: through networking events, for example, promoters were better able to share insider tips, and to co-operate in order to (for example) twin-book artists. And indeed, the idea of using collective action to solve collectively experienced challenges – challenges such as the PRS royalty hike and the securing of cost-effective line-ups of music in the face of the corporate control – remains the cited raison d’être for the organization. Despite the ideals underpinning this new collectivity, competition between members and promoters outside the organization is still fierce, and has triggered some of the most attention-grabbing feats ever achieved in the history of British festival production (discussed in the next chapter). Particularly for the independents, promoters were incentivized to innovate beyond the line-up of music, to search out new, low-cost features that could attract and retain audiences. The highly competitive climate made novelty commercially necessary to standing out from the crowd, and as a consequence, programme diversity escalated as many festivals incorporated mixed arts (sculptural installations, live graffiti, digital projections, puppetry, walkabout performance, to name a few), family-specific entertainment and artisan food.
By the end of the 2000s, promoters were bemoaning the much-feared prospect of market saturation. This state of affairs encouraged some promoters to extend their operations overseas; there is now a growing scene of European festivals that target British audiences, including dance, reggae and indie-based events in Croatia and events of similar genres in various European ski resorts. High-profile examples include Outlook, Dimensions, Soundwave, Unknown, Hideout (all Croatia), and Snowbombing (Mayrhofen, Austria), Horizon (Bansko, Bulgaria) and Snowboxx (Alpe d’Huez, France). The Spanish festival market has also become an attractive prospect for Britons; notable events include Benicàssim, Primavera Sound and Sonar. To most Britons, these festivals represent a newly conspicuous sort of product: the package holiday festival. In addition to the ample musical offerings crammed into three-day billings, these packages offer sun, sea, sand (or snow). Croatia is a notably popular location favoured by Australian, Austrian and Italian promoters, as well as British, strengthening a scene for music events in the nation’s coastal regions and islands, in particular Pag, Tisno and Pula. If such activity continues, it would not be difficult to envisage parts of Croatia following a trajectory comparable to Ibiza or Goa, as regions that became heavily and thematically associated with a dance and club culture in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, most of the companies launching festivals in Croatian regions benefit from lower production costs in many areas of spending. Existing outside of the Eurozone, there are other benefits too: costly UK regulations and licensing law are avoided, and as a consequence, the threshold for turning a profit lowered. This may be particularly fortuitous when ticket prices are set to reflect British as opposed to local spending power.
The spate of British festival startups abroad is undoubtedly one response to the many obstacles that stand in the way of turning a profit at home. Competition has raised the stakes financially, requiring promoters to produce increasingly costly events to remain relevant in the market. The consequences of failure are much more severe for independent promoters without the potential to bankroll an event through a corporate backer, and may be operating without backup capital in the form of assets or alternative business incomes. It is not unusual for personal estates – homes – or the homes of parents, to be deployed as security for drawing down advance funds from ticket vendors, in order to finance events. When things go wrong, as they sometimes do, promoters may find themselves having to remortgage their home – or at worst, sell it – just to keep their business afloat. In 2009, it was reported that the home of the promoter of Brighton’s Beachdown, Joe Pidgeon, would have to be sold to cash flow his event, even though it was cancelled (Loomes 2009). Given that openly acknowledging financial difficulty to the media is not only rare but risks repelling future ticket-buyers, it is likely that there are many more examples like this that have gone unreported. On this basis it often appears remarkable what festival promoters are prepared to risk, and it testifies to the extra-commercial motivations that influence their levels of endurance. The willingness to endure losses for protracted periods could be viewed as a form of addictive gambling, though it demonstrates that there is a mixture of promoter motivations at work; incentives shaped by perceived opportunity, perceived glamour, music fandom and – certainly for some – the hope that one more year of losses will precede a healthy profit next year. This may sound delusional, but actually, the difference between a catastrophic loss and a tidy profit is often based on no more than a few thousand tickets. Nonetheless, achieving sustainable profit from festival promotion in Britain will always elude some promoters – a scenario not helped by the view that they should expect a new music festival to make an annual loss for several years before a profit is made. Ian Forshew, co-founder of Beach Break Live, described the initial losses suffered by his festival as an ‘investment’ (in a lecture delivered for a Leeds Enterprise Network event, March 2011) while Secret Garden Party’s Freddie Fellowes, during interview, stated that ‘you cannot expect to make money in the first two years. You can conduct a controlled loss’ (Personal interview, March 2014). Upholders of this view present losses as wholly necessary to seeding a new festival in the crowded marketplace, yet for independent promoters without capital, withstanding such losses is incredibly fraught.
That festival promotion does not promise large or even slim profit margins continues to be a hard-learned reality for some, yet it has not deterred many promoters from persistence. Bizarrely, it sometimes seems as if the festival industry has adapted to this hardship by redefining success along extra-commercial lines. The UK Festival Awards, for example, granted ‘Best New Festival’ (2013) and ‘Best Lineup’ (2014) awards to the much-hyped Festival No. 6 – despite the fact that its 2014 profit and loss statement filed at Companies House shows a balance of minus £1,031,736. This figure suggests that there can sometimes be a substantial difference between the industry’s recognition of success and the financial reality, and it is not unusual for loss-making music festivals to be sustained through cash-flow bailouts from personal savings, angel investors or other more profitable businesses run by the festival directors. Although this undoubtedly reveals a sector that is highly challenging, it is arguable that it has conditioned promoters to withstand other sizeable and potentially ruinous obstacles, from ever-increasing production costs to disastrous weather. And yet, that is not to say that promoters have grown invincible. The global financial crisis coincided with a spate of festival cancellations, and in 2011, following many consecutive years of immediate sellout shows, tickets to Leeds and Reading did not sell out on release (Lawrence 2013). The following summer, the UK’s second wettest on record, there were a number of additional high profile cancellations, including Sonisphere and the Big Chill (both 2012), while others – including smaller, more independent festivals like Secret Garden Party, Kendal Calling, BoomTown Fair and Beatherder – were more resilient. Via press statements, promoters that failed cited various reasons for pulling their shows, from the Olympics that took place in London in 2012, to poor weather and the economic climate. Often, however, the real reasons remained ambiguous and likely down to an unwillingness to publicly acknowledge poor ticket sales.
As these events unfolded, should allusions to sector-wide destruction, perpetuated by some media conduits, come as much of a surprise? The ‘downturn’ in British festival ticket sales began to occupy radio shows, newspapers and industry publications in 2011, with one article asking, ‘UK Festivals: Has the Bubble Burst?’ (Salmon 2011). As stated in an industry report released the following year, the media almost appeared to ‘revel’ in the prospect of the ‘end of a golden festival era’ (UK Festival Awards Market Report 2012). With the additional challenges of slow economic recovery, poor weather and the European festivals market adding to the climate of competition, the future of British festivals seemed suddenly uncertain. They were expensive products for the consumer and there was a concern that promoters were selling non-essential experiences dependent on sizeable disposable incomes and a healthy employment rate – conditions that were, at best, unstable. At the time, it seemed likely that the economic rut would trigger a decline of the festivals sector, as the Coalition government’s austerity measures settled over the nation. However, as is often the case with media representations, the ‘festivals crisis’ was greatly exaggerated. People continued to attend festivals, and in 2014 it was reported that the festivals market had not undergone rapid decline but that ‘the festival sector as a whole is currently on a relatively even keel, albeit with a few high profile casualties in 2012 and 2014’ (Webster 2014). The endurance of the sector suggests that music festivals are not, as were once thought, ‘luxury’ goods. Many festival-goers appear to consider them essential and ultimately found ways to pay for their tickets, helped by the introduction by some promoters of tiered tickets and payment plans to accommodate changes in financial circumstances. As promoters emphasized discounted early-birds and monthly payment plans into the 2010s, they were able to provide cheap and more affordable options, which maintained the affordability of many festivals despite the incremental increase in ticket prices throughout the period. This was particularly important given the stagnation of wages in post-crisis Britain (which increased at a rate of only 0.6 per cent per year, compared to the pre-crisis average of 4 per cent (The Economist 2014)), though it also allowed promoters to collect revenues further in advance of the festival, which could be used to cash flow their business.
By 2013, 40 per cent of festival-goers in an audience survey said that the recession didn’t affect their festival plans, which was interpreted as demonstrable of ‘strong support’ for festivals (UK Festival Awards Market Report 2013). Given the pessimism of the media, and the length and severity of the financial crisis, it is surprising that the market was not blighted in a more serious way. Arguably, all it did was level off a steepness of growth that was most likely unsustainable anyway, stalling ill-conceived startups and killing off weaker events. The legacy of this economic shakeout lives on: in order to survive in the crowded and unpredictable British market, festivals must cultivate loyalty through the delivery of programming that is highly reactive to changing tastes and evolving markets.
Festival line-ups cannot help but be sensitive to the broader consumption of recorded music, and on these grounds, any shifts in the ecology of the recording industries will most likely initiate some form of change in live music. It is clear that festival audiences grew rapidly post-millennium, while radical changes to music commerce were acutely palpable: as Napster and other file-sharing sites crippled revenues from recordings, the foreclosure of Tower Records (2006) and Virgin Megastore (2008) made headline news as symbolic casualties, signalling the irrelevancy of the high street record-store format. These closures show that the digital revolution greatly undermined the profitability of making and selling records in the 2000s. At the same time, the changing terrain also created new opportunities for listening as music fans gained an unprecedented level of access to an enormous supply of recorded music, from any era. With expanded listening capacity, the ‘traditional’ boundaries of music scenes became blurred and increasingly permeated with the motifs of other subcultures. As more fluid, ambiguous social groups, the scenesters and emo kids of the 2000s were perceptibly unlike the subcultures that preceded them. Arguably, the very possibility for subcultures as defined and symbolic forms of resistance, as Dick Hebdige presented them in 1979, had ceased to exist. The vast availability of free musical content most likely aided the growth of the live sector, through introducing audiences to an unprecedented range of artists, yet digitization radically altered the opportunities available to the artist. In this new, more fraught economic climate, record labels were encouraged to limit their dealings to artists with the safest commercial potential. Similarly, many artists were expected to have a demonstrable following, identity and sound before a label would take them up. Perhaps the best example of this is the Arctic Monkeys, a platinum selling four-piece that is often considered a product of the YouTube generation (Barton 2005). Multi-million pound advances for commercially risky artists have become more rare, as has tour support for ‘baby’ bands. The traditional record label model might have gone into decline, but as the Arctic Monkeys most conspicuously underlines, artists were presented with new and accessible promotional opportunities: DIY online listening platforms like MySpace, launched in 2003, Soundcloud and Spotify, both launched in 2008, performed nuanced functions. YouTube and Soundcloud provided support for the burgeoning surplus of unsigned bands and ‘bedroom DJs’, the former allowing promoters, radio-show hosts, and, of course, the fans, to use targeted search engines to pinpoint new music according to region and genre. Spotify rapidly became, with Last FM, a leading digital listening platform for mainstream and alternative music, paying out to artists in the form of royalty payments.4
The ways in which the promoters of live music indirectly benefited from digitalization were subtle, though it is a side of affairs that was, during the Napster-induced hand-wringing at the time, rarely reported. Frith argued that an important change was digital seat booking and ticket distribution, which yielded consumer data and made possible the global ticketing business (Frith et al. in progress). Yet taking a broader perspective, an obvious boon for promoters was that the free availability of music repositioned records as teasers, used to sell the live show. For many people, MP3 downloads had become the precursor to ticket purchases, though crucially, listeners were obliged to pay for the live music experience even if they obtained recordings at the expense of the artist. This commercial reconfiguration and the increased capacity for free listening has benefited the festival sector, and explains why, at the time of writing, live music revenues are almost double the revenues for recorded music (Mintel 2014). This shift in commercial value was discerned in earlier years; the 2008 Mintel Report for example warned that ‘much of the action’ had shifted to the live music sector. It is probable that these circumstances naturally drew musically minded entrepreneurs towards starting up concerts and festivals, who might have launched record labels had they entered the industry 10 years previously. In the 2000s, established industry figures similarly looked to festivals as an opportunity to diversify incomes from music: Rob da Bank for example launched Bestival in 2003 after establishing himself as a Radio One DJ and founder of record label Sunday Best. He also announced a distribution deal in 2014, in view of a Bestival franchise of sorts, which will begin the introduction of international counterparts (Festival Insights 2014). Many artists also saw the potential in playing the festival circuit, while some began staging or curating their own events, including Peter Gabriel (Womad) and the Levellers (Beautiful Days).
Though the decline of income from record sales put pressure on artists to perform more frequently, in order to compensate for the loss, it would be erroneous to assume that this produced, for the festival promoter, a glut of affordable acts with significant ticket-selling potential. If such were the case, there would have been a decline or plateau in high profile artist fees for performing at festivals, when the opposite is, in fact, true. The influx of new festival promoters, combined with the decline in investment in new artists by record labels, instead created an environment of fierce competition to secure ticket-selling artists in the appropriate genres. This allowed British booking agents to take indirect control of the British festival market, setting minimum artist fees, supplying them to the highest or most powerful bidders, and ultimately controlling the supply of the sector’s ticket-selling assets. Line-up bookings for festivals continue to be secured through a competitive bidding process; offers are placed on the artist for performing on a particular date, and there may be competing offers from other parties. In such cases, it is usually the highest bidder that secures the artist, though other factors will also influence the booking decision, such as the degree of fit between the artist and event brand, the pre-existing agent/promoter relationship, and the level of media interest the event attracts.
It is money, however, that ultimately talks. In the festival industry, the most high profile artist performances are leveraged by an established handful of events, including Glastonbury, the Isle of Wight Festival, Reading and Leeds Festival, V Festivals, Download and T in the Park. A small number of parent companies own or part own the majority of these events – namely Live Nation’s Gaiety Holdings (the owner of Festival Republic, its festival arm), SJM Concerts, Metropolis and Mama Group. Pre-established relationships with agents, intertwined ownership structures and financial capital provides these companies with dominant purchasing power for securing headlining and supporting artists. It is perhaps remarkable, despite this advantage, that independent, small to medium-sized festivals are perceived as a potential threat to these big players – deducible from the increased use of artist exclusivities (see below) to block smaller competitors – a practice heavily criticized by a panel at the first Association of Independent Festivals Congress in 2014, which included 2000trees director, James Scarlett, among others. Exclusivities limit the effects of direct competition by preventing crucial assets, usually first or second headline performances, from appearing elsewhere and then cannibalizing ticket sales. Up until the end of the 2000s this was a standard practice for main headliners, though more recently, exclusivity deals are also being exercised further down the bill. In a crowded market, this is a straightforward strategy for survival: because competition has grown, so too has the aggressiveness of efforts to control ticket-selling content.
New and popular music is of high commercial value to the festival sector though it often seems that there is a shortfall in terms of supply of high profile acts, particularly for the rock genre heavily associated with the British festival format.5 This is one consequence of the demise of investment in new folk, rock and indie acts by the recording industry, affecting festivals large and small: as Glastonbury’s Ben Challis commented, in a personal interview in 2014, ‘there is a shortage. It’s noticeable how it’s started to shrink’. The relative scarcity of new and appropriate bands with popular appeal also multiplies the economic worth of a lucky few (and their fortuitous booking agents and managers), which can price out the promoters of smaller music festivals, however much they may wish to keep their programming up to date.
When an artist is both appropriate and affordable, a promoter may often find that the booking agent has placed a performance embargo in the form of the exclusivity clause on them, because another festival has booked the artist. Speaking in an interview with eFestivals, Ralph Broadbent of Derbyshire’s Y-Not Festival, a small boutique event of 5,000, claimed that the exclusivities put in place by corporate festival promoters made the programming of his event extremely difficult. Broadbent frequently found that, due to exclusivities, all of the artists he wanted to book for Y-Not were unavailable. This points to a wider issue: that while exposure and additional income obviously serve the best interests of the artist, many are prevented from receiving these anywhere near as frequently as they are offered by festival bookers. Broadbent claimed that this has a somewhat neutralizing effect on musical fandom. Speaking of the festival majors:
Ultimately what they want to do is make anyone that wants to see any of the popular new music acts have to go to the big festivals. This makes things very tricky for us, as we don’t have the budgets to compete with them … it definitely prevents fans from seeing the acts they love.
I think that’s also why we don’t see any new massive artists nowadays that you used to … To me, I can’t see any massive acts being able to develop, you get to a certain level now and that’s the ceiling. That ceiling has been built by this cloak of exclusivities for large performances. It’s really frustrating for us, because music is just music, and it should be there for everyone to have a good time, and I feel it’s all about the money these days. (Williams 2012)
As for-profit businesses, it might be reasonable to expect major festival brands to protect their assets, yet Broadbent was right in highlighting a real problem for festivals at the smaller end of the market. High demand for artists across an increased number of festivals has also created an additional pressure: an inflation of artist fees (Jones 2013). While exclusivities might limit the number of performances, for high profile acts the gains to be had when they do perform can be very generous – Eminem reportedly made £2 million from headlining the V Festivals in 2011, for example (Frith 2011). This, coupled with the decline in earnings from record sales, has encouraged many ‘heritage’ or ‘evergreen’ acts to make a return to the scene. In today’s digitized world, the failure of the recording industry to establish an adequate number of affordable profile artists to supply the market has created a uniquely timed opportunity for acts whose careers were forged in the 1980s or 1990s. Such acts are now finding that the performance opportunities available to them are as much as or even more lucrative now, than when they were at their peak of fame, simply due to the conditions of the market. This scenario has produced nostalgic line-ups suitable for an ageing audience demographic (see ‘The Silver Economy: Rock Festivals Grow Old Gracefully’, Financial Times, 2014), and has encouraged disbanded artists to reform. The enormously high profile reunions of Blur (2009), the Libertines (2010) and Pulp (2011) were, at least in some part, a response to the fact that the festival market was a commercially attractive option for bands – the Libertines for example were reportedly paid £1.5 million for their performances at Leeds/Reading in 2010 (Gregory 2010). Despite the non-commercial motivations cited by each of these bands, the commercial climate surely provided a powerful incentive for these reunions to take place in the first instance.
Ultimately, it is the hunt for available, ticket-selling acts by an inflated number of festival promoters that has helped to create a powerful demand for bands whose golden eras were thought to be behind them, or as the NME decried, for the ‘endless reunions’, and ‘the shortening of the feedback loop of a band breaking up, to a band reforming for a visit to the festival trough’ (King and Wolfson 2010). Despite the many jubilant and nostalgic media responses to the reunion of bands such as Blur and Pulp, reunions are not universally accepted as positive. King goes on to suggest that reformed bands have become something quite different to their original incarnations: ‘music as vintage – a weathered accessory to a boutique lifestyle … a conservative streak in pop culture … a sense that the past is more worth celebrating than the now’ (King and Wolfson 2010). Anticipating the Libertines’ reunion to play at Leeds and Reading for a reported £1.5 million, he somewhat scathingly describes their set as a fake reproduction of their former selves, a ‘download in human form’ (King and Wolfson 2010). These claims were balanced by the words of co-author Wolfson, who argued that reunions introduce artists and genres to new audiences – audiences that want to experience reunited acts. It is not surprising that this, combined with the upward shift in festival-goer age at a number of events, has presented reformed bands with fortuitous opportunities in the festivals sector.
It is clear that these developments in the consumption of popular music have played a significant role in both the availability of music festivals and their featured content. As audiences have come to enjoy vast collections of music at their fingertips, the expansion of the festivals sector has ushered in its fragmentation into multiple, niche markets. This is in part an expression of increased participation across age groups, though the diversity of events within the sector also incorporates more music genres and socio-cultural groupings. Festival promoters are diversifying their means of appeal through assembling brand identities that put line-ups together with extra-musical offerings: artisan food, location, sport, family-friendly activities, decor and installation art. A festival’s ability to sell itself has become increasingly reliant on its ability to convey this enhanced product to its target audiences. The daily habitation of festival-goers in cyberspace, and their widespread uptake of social media, online shopping, gaming and browsing, have produced deluges of information regularly deployed for this purpose. Like most businesses, festival promoters now operate in an immensely data rich terrain. The deployment of analytical tools to understand consumer data has become vital to targeted promotion, yielding insights that feed into the strategic management of festival brands. There are only so many artists, traders and producers to supply the British festival industry in a way that equals profit, which can lead some promoters down the same path of production. The danger of becoming indistinguishable from competitors is that the same audiences are diluted across too many events. Leveraged through the development of nuanced identities, difference has therefore become a powerful currency for the promoter, which has accelerated the drive towards industry fragmentation. Though the boundaries between all festivals are unfixed, and festival-goers are a transient sort of populace, key differences are reproduced by brand design, marketing and targeted clientele. As McKay has argued, ‘your choice [in festival] definitely says something about your identity’ (in Winterman 2010). Stereotypes associated with festival brands might include flamboyant, vintage-inspired, rebellious, designer, athletic, bohemian or upper class. The clustering of these characteristics around particular event brands is the result of intentional steps towards achieving distinction via assemblages of musical preference and other parameters associated with age, fashion and politics. As promoters have refined this distinction, the crystallization of associated identities around particular events has created a kind of festival-goer ‘lifespan’. Beyond the festivals that are poised to attract teenagers and students, there are events that now cater for more mature festival-goers in their 20s and 30s, while festivals like Wilderness and Festival No. 6 (founded in 2011 and 2012 respectively) slot into the middle-aged bracket through strategic marketing. If festival-goers outgrow the festival they were drawn to in their teens, they are able to shift into additional formats designed to appeal to their age group, that nonetheless retain the informal atmosphere at the heart of the culture.
In pursuing this differentiation, music festivals that tap into cultural reservoirs largely unexploited by other festivals do particularly well. At the time of writing, BoomTown Fair hosts a diverse spectrum of sounds, though it absorbs a pool of artists that are largely irrelevant to the events owned by the corporations. Its artists are niche, underground and/or heritage, performing music in the genres of reggae, ska and gypsy-punk, and as co-founder Lak Mitchell stated in a personal interview, in 2014, ‘none of our artists touch those big touring agencies’. Because the event does not compete for the same artists as the festival majors it is not adversely affected by imposed exclusivity clauses. As a result, by minimizing the potential for any conflict with better-established events, BoomTown has adapted to function perfectly well outside of the monopolizing forces of the festivals industry, tapping into a latent fanbase that has seen it leap from a 5,000 to a 38,000 capacity event in just four years.
Despite the dominance of major label artists within the commercial festival sector, a level of meritocracy does, then, define the market today: as the success of BoomTown has shown, promoters doing something different may be rewarded by the purchase decisions of festival-goers. However it is likely that many festivals, particularly those with a more narrow appeal, are born with a sell-by date. Leeds and Reading Festivals, powerfully associated with rock, indie, punk and skatepunk, saw a tradition of largely white, largely male guitar bands dominate its headline billings for many years, such as the Arctic Monkeys, Metallica and the Foo Fighters. However, as the cancellations of the rock and metal event Sonisphere in 2012 and 2015 would similarly suggest, it is more difficult to both programme and sell this formula to festival-goers of the 2010s, compared to the 1990s. The promoters of Leeds/Reading and Sonisphere could adapt their formula, yet going too far in that direction could confuse the brand and alienate dedicated supporters of the original identity. The situation is a difficult one, and the reduced ticket sales of recent years could suggest that the Leeds and Reading brand may be approaching stagnation (Strictly Reading and Leeds 2011). Dance-oriented festivals Parklife (launched 2010) and We Are FSTVL (launched 2012) appeal to young festival-goers and may represent more up-to-date, relevant brands, as they do not appear to be suffering from shortfalls in artist availability and have been able to draw more widely upon contemporary performers. As a result, both have grown their audiences in a remarkably short period of time, in particular Parklife, which has ballooned from 17,000 to 70,000 per day. The sector is, then, segmenting groups of consumers but also shifting to reflect current preferences and musical trends.
As music festivals have expanded audiences for live music in Britain, so too has the media – in particular television, radio and Internet sites – connected festivals to a wide pool of broadcast recipients. Main stage performances at Glastonbury, T in the Park, Leeds and Reading Festivals are now annual features of terrestrial television programming each summer (Glastonbury is shown across BBC TV channels and on the ‘Red Button’; Leeds/Reading and T in the Park are shown on BBC Three), while BBC Radio 1, 2 and 6 feature extensive coverage of Glastonbury, and more limited coverage for a wide range of festival events. At one time, the possibility that this breadth of coverage might for some events cannibalize the live audience would have been a legitimate concern. Prior to the initiation of major broadcasts, it was unknown whether mediated performance would devalue the live experience by providing a cheap or free substitute. The question was: would audiences continue to purchase costly festival tickets if they had access to watching broadcast performances for free? The short answer to this has proved to be yes – absolutely. Televised performance has not stifled the live audience; if anything it has done the opposite, as the live audience has continued to grow. Perhaps this is unsurprising: there is a quality to the direct experience that cannot be replaced by second-hand media transmissions, and it seems intuitive that there are extra-musical motives for attendance beyond the narrow representations regularly shown. Broadcasts also do not target the same audience as the live events. Those who choose to watch pop festivals on television are not always the same people who attend in the flesh.
The media has, nonetheless, played an extremely supportive role in the development of British music festivals: exposure is advertising, which has ushered in the mainstream acceptance of the festival format as a recognized mode of sociality. Broadcasters also have to pay promoters for broadcast rights, so support constitutes the provision of additional funding for the event. Broadcasting has also performed the vital function, as Anderton has noted, of reassuring audiences on issues of safety and quality (Anderton 2008, 47). On these grounds, the primetime inclusion of pop, rock and dance festivals on the living room TV has rendered them familiar, accessible and, perhaps, less enigmatic – weakening their historical association with outspoken and extroverted risk takers, as the bohemian upholders of some subcultural cause. Festival coverage in the media has played a key role in popularization, though as can happen in many fields of culture, its deployment has had a somewhat distorting effect in controlling what kind of festival is shown. This is because the process of selectivity governing this process inevitably magnifies certain features over others. Radio and television in particular adopts a focus on main stage performance; not only is the audio-visual format of featured artists in music amenable to media conduits but the referencing of ‘big names’ is also appropriate, common-denominator content for the broadcast audience. As a result, some coverage is biased towards reproducing a concert-model definition of the British music festival, despite the complex, arts-heavy environments that many have developed into. However, it is usually in the interests of the festival to broadcast more diverse representations of their own – and high levels of competition have forced some festivals to develop into efficient media machines, which employ press experts, marketing staff and large teams of photographers and videographers. Through online platforms, positively spun content can be edited and released year-round – deploying selectivity, and occasionally some technical artistry, to emphasize sunshine, happy children and photogenic DJs – the ‘ideal’ festival environment and experience, in other words. Even the photography of very wet and muddy festivals will present inclement weather as a context for playful sociality. With summer festival coverage so ubiquitous each year, these features have become institutionalized as a permanent feature of British national identity. This has made it difficult not to participate in some way, whether through reading a newsfeed preview, hearing line-up announcements on the local radio or catching half an hour of Glastonbury headline coverage on BBC Two; even those who actively choose not to engage will probably be aware that the festival is taking place. In particular, the near-inescapable multi-channel, multi-station coverage of Glastonbury by the BBC is remarkable in this respect. Switching from its official media partnership with Channel 4 to the BBC in 1997, live coverage is now undertaken by all four of its radio channels and four television channels. The extent of this coverage can be viewed as somewhat ironic, since Glastonbury certainly doesn’t require any assistance from the media in selling tickets, while many others do. Yet the BBC is addressing (or even creating) the demand to watch this festival among inter-generational audiences, which is extremely high because of its long-standing, flagship status.
The close partnership between the BBC and Glastonbury is not a standard one, for Glastonbury is no standard event – yet it has set a precedent for partnerships with newer festivals which are able to exploit narrower forms of exposure. The alliance between the Festival Republic-owned Latitude and BBC 6 Music, for example, is well positioned because both parties target a similar audience who can be stereotyped as mature, discerning, Guardian-reading music fans with an enduring appreciation for live performance and, importantly, the arts. The associated cost of mobilizing the press in a similar way, through paid advertising for example, means that smaller and independent events can be disadvantaged, which many of them address by robustly leveraging the promotional capabilities of the regional and specialist music press, enlisting the viral advocacy of bloggers, local newspapers, fanzines and music magazines. The patronage of media gatekeepers may be won by offering little more than a pair of complementary guestlist tickets, and perhaps for the more important publications such as the Guardian or the NME, a little VIP treatment on top. For reasons such as this, independent journalists can be just as biased towards producing generous coverage as official, national media partners. Whether large or small, the press engages in a kind of gift-exchange with PR companies working on behalf of festivals. When the company allows reviewers to enter their client’s event for free, there is a hope (if not direct expectation) of a return favour. In the event of a negative review, there is also nothing preventing organizers and press companies from blacklisting journalists from attending future events as a de facto punishment. The engagement of the press by festivals is, then, premised on producing a particular kind of coverage that has assisted in the larger project of pushing festivals into an accepted sphere of sociality.6 These issues are the inevitable outcome of the commercial relations between festivals and media parties, though the real impact of such alliances is far from conclusive due to the ineffable power of word of mouth. BoomTown, for example, has proliferated rapidly through online hype and personal recommendations without financial advantage over the national media. It is also true that high levels of commercial leverage have not achieved financial or critical success for some festivals: Wireless Festival, owned by Live Nation and sponsored by O2, the northern counterpart of Wireless Festival, cancelled in 2008, for example. This underlines an important point: while journalists can be enlisted to promote a popular event further, their influence on sustained ticket sales may be more limited. A festival does actually have to supply something that is genuinely sensitive to the values of the festival-goer, if they are to return year on year. On this basis, it is the audience that is the real driving force behind the commercial success of a festival, not media manipulation, and their loyalty depends on the provision of tangible and not just marketed qualities. This is influenced by an additional factor, which are the insights gained through social media. Although they can be manipulated too, fan-created (and festival promoter-created) content is a method for reaching audiences and often it is the amateur YouTube videos, Twitter comments and the personal Facebook photographs that capture the aesthetic minutiae and micro-interactions hidden behind the main-stage mega-spectacles, albeit in an unpolished and fragmentary way.
As festivals have become increasingly sewn into British identity, with just under one in 10 Britons attending a festival at the time of writing (Mintel 2014), they have come to star in mainstream television in ways that both mimic and distort reality. This ‘seeping in’ to wider popular culture signals the simulacrum of festival counterculture as its themes of escape and amplified bacchanal are neutralized into safe, common and expected forms of leisure. As the credo goes, ‘life mimics art, and art mimics life’, and if reality TV and soap operas can be improbably classified as art, this has indeed taken place. On 11 October 2012, the 40-year-old ITV show Emmerdale decided to introduce a music festival to the soap’s narrative.7 As the drama unfolds in the Yorkshire countryside, the festival is conceived from the outset as a commercial venture of landowners, rather than as a labour of love. It plays upon the tensions between the discomforted old-timer, whose peaceful residence is temporarily shattered, the raucous festival-goers with flowers in their hair, and the shrewd business owners who tolerate the festival’s disruption on the promise of much-needed profit. As a backdrop to its hackneyed human drama, Emmerdale’s pop festival was actually a rather accurate portrayal of the social collisions that occur when music festivals unfold across the English countryside each year, capturing the main stakeholders involved in festival culture; their incentives, concerns and transactions. The festival is cast as an ordinary, expected activity for the youth of the village who perform the fleeting role of the ‘weekend hippy’.
Ironically, subsequently aired reality-TV depictions of British festivals were less ‘real’ than this complete dramatization: using music festival as a contextual frame, several voyeuristic shows aimed at 18–24 year olds have been broadcast in recent years. Partnering with the makers of Made in Chelsea, the mobile phone corporation BlackBerry backed the 2012 series Summer Daze, which was aired on Channel 4. Bringing the festival experience into the living rooms of millions of viewers, the programme followed festival-goers around as they visited a number of British music festivals, including Global Gathering, Wakestock, Standon Calling, BoomTown, V Festival and Latitude. The participants were limited by the age range targeted by the programme makers (the oldest was 24), and in between liberal shots of coiffed festival-goers using their BlackBerry mobile phones, the programme drew into focus the fashionable, flirtatious – and arguably superficial – elements of the scene. It is perhaps not surprising that this editorial angling would be the outcome of a show created by the producers of Made in Chelsea – a programme loved and reviled in equal measure. The portrayal predictably distorted reality through age selection and the archetypal presentation of participants, yet it was innocent compared to the next voyeuristic dramatization – the BBC’s Festivals, Sex and Suspicious Parents. The series could be considered robust evidence for a moral decline in mainstream TV, for it principally entertains through the ritualized humiliation of young teenagers (and their parents). In 2014, the producers of the show opted for British music festivals as the setting for carefully selected participants, which marked a change from the usual touristic locales chosen for eliciting the ‘Brit abroad’-style misdemeanour seen on Sex, Sun and Suspicious Parents – the producer’s hallmark programme. Film crews followed young participants around Sundown and Kendal Calling under the guise of filming an innocent documentary focused on exploring their first festival experiences. Unbeknownst to them, their parents were hiding in nearby locations and were regularly shown footage of their behaviour.
As far as the festivals were concerned, their inclusion in the show merely formed a background context, yet there was a feeling that these programmes presented festival-goers to the mainstream public in such a way as to imply that they were (at best) immature, shallow, arrogant and vain, and (at worst) out of control, promiscuous, brutish and even violent. Concerns were voiced as to the exploitative element of the show, particularly in respects to a female, teenage participant, Lauren, who was broadcast urinating in broad daylight in the centre of the main arena. Of course it is probable that she signed a waiver before participating in the show, yet it is unlikely she estimated quite how negative her televised self would appear, or the fact that it would permanently live on in cyberspace. It is certainly arguable that the programme’s producers treated these young festival-goers as targets for televised downfall – as the Guardian journalist Rebecca Nicholson claimed in February 2014. This was no different to the kind of set-ups that have defined reality TV as a genre that is simultaneously mesmerizing and cruel, yet unlike the ‘Brit abroad’ stereotype normally utilized by the show’s producers, the depictions shown on Festivals, Sex and Suspicious Parents really were at odds with the sorts of behaviour observed at the vast majority of British music festivals. Yet real reality, of course, is not the point of such media exercises. While festivals form a major part of the BBC’s music policy, these broadcasts reconstitute newspaper portrayals of ravers in the late 1980s; they similarly emphasize sex, disorder, the grotesque, inebriation and danger, and in doing so, are angled to incite condemnation and disapproval on the part of viewers.
To portray the issue in terms of an acutely dysfunctional media would be inaccurate however; for in the wider scheme, these mainstream TV shows have discharged a mere drop of negativity into the informational ocean. Despite the transition of TV brands into mobile apps and online dissemination sites, TV still competes with social media and the blogosphere as great swathes of alternative information sources produced and consumed by the public. This development has shaped the interface between festival promoters and festival-goers, and both parties are able to exploit a shared commons space for a range of interactions: buying, selling, bartering, community building and information gathering. Importantly for the festival-goers, they are able to fuel and enjoy an atmosphere of anticipation with a virtual community long before the event. With the festival crowd fully plugged into high speed broadband Internet, and empowered by smart communications devices and social media, successful festivals have fully deployed their online presence as a reactive interface and sales tool. The habitation of users within clearly locatable sites, and their use of specific and emergent media platforms, has diversified the means by which these functions can be achieved. Beyond the core websites owned and maintained by festivals, Virtual Festivals and eFestivals are two such sites which have become important resources for both festival-goers and promoters, offering journalistic coverage and community-focused forums for discussion about topics ranging from line-up speculation, past experiences, to practical advice and informal survival guides.
Beyond these, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social platforms are vital for connecting festival brands to fans, particularly the young. One of the most powerful tools in this respect for the last decade has been Facebook Pages, introduced in 2010, which forced many community and business groups to migrate to a new ‘timeline’ format. This format continues to provide audience insights free to the page administrators, though the deployment of the information for efficacious advertising purposes usually comes at a cost. Nonetheless, data analytics allows promoters to optimize their postings for interaction by providing key information and targeted advertising opportunities. The extent and value of the interactivity that Facebook Pages promote may be less than one would expect, however. For example, though 70,000 people attended Bestival in 2014, the highest number of status ‘likes’ in the week preceding the show was 1, 214, less than 2 per cent of its total clientele. This example may be a cause to rethink communication between festival promoters and fans via social media, yet the very nature of Facebook as a social commons nonetheless provides an instantly accessible route to direct communication. Also, while the regular posting of material posted by festivals may not incite interaction, this should not suggest that followers have not consumed the information. Festivals’ Facebook pages can be considered a virtual form of the physical, on-site community that live festivals engender; a more permanent cyberspace that is inhabited by fans long before, and long after, the live event.
For better or for worse, the development of online communities in the twenty-first century offers the potential for festival promoters to place their events in direct and daily view of potential ticket-buyers, targeted via demographic classifications (like age, location, ‘liked’ pages, etc.) that allow promoters to reach specific markets. These methods of segmentation are fairly standard, but prior to Facebook, the commissioning of research of this kind was highly expensive and available only to companies with considerable capital at their disposal. The cheap accessibility of data-informed (as opposed to intuitive) promotions for amateur and professional festival organizers is a recent development. Anyone with Internet access can set up an account and gain access to Facebook’s audience metrics and quantitative insights, and although Facebook has become highly commercialized in recent years, it does allow businesses plenty of room to set their own budgets. As a consequence of such boons to promotion, fan connectivity through social media marketing has been embraced not only because of broad communicative potential but also because of its assistance in streamlining information to relevant parties while yielding highly valuable data in the process. Deciding tactics based on the interpretation of such data has become a specialist area of marketing, and necessarily so, for the dynamism of online innovations mean that optimum strategy can shift one month to the next, requiring an immense effort on the part of events businesses to stay up-to-date through continuous research and specialist human resource.
Despite the challenges inherent in this continuous state of flux, social media such as Facebook allows festivals to reach audiences with a stream of continuous communication. Links to ticket vendors or featured artists, playlists, practical information, volunteer callouts and ‘warm-up’ posts, that build anticipation, are commonly posted via Facebook and other social platforms. Photography-based representation performs a vital function, outperforming traditional ‘fly-poster’ style adverts in the ability to attract and intrigue audiences. The periods of time that are the most important in this respect are often the three months prior to the festival, and immediately afterwards, when interest is still peaking and fans are logging on for the first time post-event. Short, slickly edited promotional videos and high quality, well-arranged photographs – which can be edited to look more appealing – are vital for maintaining festival audiences in the digital age, and it is significant that the imagery chosen for this purpose often tends to emphasize the fundamentals of diversity and atmosphere, over particular featured artists. Galleries that reveal bombast and spectacle have directly contributed to the growth of events that are particularly visually engaging and complex: Bestival, Secret Garden Party, BoomTown, and others, have been able to capture unusual and unique features and place seductive imagery in the direct path of the most likely ticket-buyers.
It is no coincidence that the successful capture of visual spectacle, decor and the arts has propelled certain festivals to industry leadership. Location is also important in this respect: impressions of empty festival grounds in various states of seasonal glory pre-event point to the increased reliance upon place by some festival promoters for destination marketing. The conspicuously touristic way that Portmeirion – the location of Festival No. 6 – and the Lake District – the location of Kendal Calling – are similarly used by the promoters illustrates how the British countryside is perceived as adding value. Today, patrons are not only visiting a music festival, they are buying an experience within packaged, scenic destinations. This has further widened the scope for creating niche brands, because it has allowed some events to promote a sense of place at least as intensely as other, more traditional attributes like the line-up of music. This strategy makes use of pre-existing history, themes and values associated with particular locations (as is most clearly seen in the case of Portmeirion and Festival No. 6).
The Internet and increased smartphone usage has also widened the scope for introducing fans to previously unseen elements of festival production, enhancing a sense of greater access and demystifying the process of cultural production. Images posted on social media for example invite fans into the elusive, backstage world of the festival build, a strategy that often achieves a surprisingly high impact in terms of likes, comments and shares. In the weeks prior to the live event, many promoters choose to post pictures of the build, depicting images of the site gradually taking shape, which may feature Portaloos, fencing, the installation of temporary demountable structures or the arrival of lorries. The use of such postings is aligned with the wider trend for ‘the making of’ documentaries; content which self-reflects on the process of making popular culture. In the context of festivals, the approach appeals to fans because they are presented with an event that appears less doctored – though such representations are, in actuality, just as easy to edit and distort.
Fan-produced coverage of festivals, lacking the manufactured sheen of official photography, can produce valuable insights for both promoters and festival-goers; Instagram for example allows users to see the festival through the eyes of festival-goers via hash-tagged images collected at the event. Via this medium, among the standard images of friends and entertainments, there are more obvious allegiances to the festival expressed through photographs of logo-heavy posters, wristbands and merchandise. This can be powerful advertising precisely because it comes from the fans – especially when interesting, colourful and aesthetically pleasing backdrops are captured. However, just as the PR executive of a celebrity pop star will try to prevent ungainly images of their client from circulating in the press, so too do some festival marketeers move to block the official release of images that show their events as excessively bleak, dirty, wet, muddy or grey – which, in the British Isles, they very often are. Social media opens a window, yet the visage can engender a specific and commercial purpose. A quick review of official image postings from many music festivals will often show that less attractive festival-goers are often screened out in favour of better looking or trendier counterparts. Those with appearances that are less appealing or less consistent with the desired brand are easily filed away to exclude those who are perceived as too fat, too old, too boring, too ‘chavvy’, too ‘laddy’, too hippie, or too stoned. To assume, therefore, that the interactive quality of social media automatically leads to a more balanced portrayal of festival is not always correct. It is also very easy for marketeers, like any other commercial brand, to deploy the unique advantage of direct communication to mislead the public for profitable gain. Social media managers must avoid, however, being too transparent in this aim, for the identity of the festival is often most effective when it characterizes a personable individual, not a salesperson. The most effective media ‘voice’ balances sales-based messages with wit, imagination, humour and honesty. Achieving this is difficult, and has required most festivals to tackle social media PR head on, either in-house or by seeking out specialist resource to manage this delicate art. Information type, style and mode of delivery are areas for the potential optimization of fan connectivity they must consider in the deployment of emergent social media platforms. In terms of the dissemination of key event information, this may appear qualitatively no different to the styling of a printed poster design, or the careful choosing of words for the traditional press release – except that the voices of festival-goers can publicly respond to social media broadcasts. This is not always beneficial for festivals; criticism can be harsh, frequent, exaggerated – and, sometimes, unfounded. Negative festival-goer comments on public platforms are difficult to hide or ignore; simply deleting comments or blocking particular users is a practice that is not always effective since it only incites angrier feedback, and alienating complainants is obviously a flawed solution. Negative feedback from the public is a force that must be reckoned with, however, for any issues such as the cleanliness of toilets, the timeliness of the band schedule, or the length of the bar queues, are virtually guaranteed to appear later and in full view of a wide audience in the form of tweets and comments.
As is often the case with so much online discourse, critical declarations have a habit of rapidly descending into emotionally impassioned debate. Criticism that appears excessively harsh is then joined by the voices of loyalists coming to the defence of the festival, spurring prolonged arguments that speedily and publicly cloud the more convivial recollections that may be held by the silent majority. The volatility of negative feedback from ticket-buyers has the potential to cause angst and embarrassment on the part of promoters, yet there are obvious gains to be made from forms of analysis that are freely given by those who are both stakeholders and interested enough to supply it. A review of comments following a festival provides a direct, if not somewhat skewed, source of event evaluation, without the lengthy and bureaucratic process of questionnaires and surveys that customers may avoid filling in. Like many other businesses and products that are regularly reviewed and rated online, the public nature of customer feedback has created a powerful impetus to reduce damaging PR by actually resolving the problems identified. Problematically, however, simply reading comments and ‘getting a feel’ for the public’s opinion on matters is methodologically impaired. The dangers inherent to this element of fan connectivity is that organizational decisions can be spurred on by those who complain the loudest, rather than by issues that could be prioritized on sounder grounds. Nevertheless, this shift of power to the consumer can be described as a democratizing effect, and for festivals at least, it has generated more than just incentives to resolve practical problems.
Creative programming can also been influenced by direct feedback on social media: outsourcing to the crowd, or ‘crowdsourcing’, points to the direct utilization of festival-goer opinion for determining the festival programme. This concept appears, on the surface of things, an intuitive programming solution. As peak experiences that are often saved up for and looked forward to throughout the year, the festivals may be more prone to successfully eliciting creative collaboration online than brands that are consumed in a more disinterested fashion. Secondly, the very nature of festival implies a gathered community united by a few, albeit loose, points of interest; we expect to have more in common with the fellow festival-goer at Reading, for example, than the fellow fast food diner in a Burger King restaurant – we eat, sleep and party together at a festival. Soliciting the online crowd for specific, creative purposes is, according to some, a potentially fortuitous prospect. Industry analysts have voiced this possibility; the 2013 festival industry Mintel report, for example, cites a Primal Scream show whereby the set list and support act were determined by the outcome of social media polls. On this basis, the report claims that promoters will increasingly deploy crowdsourcing to find out what acts fans wish to see and what songs they want them to play (Mintel 2013). However, this technique may prove a lot more difficult to deploy in reality than this report suggests, for booking a high profile outfit is not simply a case of choosing from a catalogue, depending instead upon which acts are touring, what exclusivity agreements have been secured, and what fee can be negotiated with artist management. Even if the crowd does choose a particular act, artists may not be secured in real terms even if the funding is available.
Due to the nature of the industry, then, what we are actually seeing in the festival industry is the use of crowdsourcing alternatives to these predictions, in that it is focused on areas of creative programming that present lower risks of backfiring. Theme selection is a good example of this, and is a safe bet for organizers for they, in actual fact, are in full control of this area. Kendal Calling for example, as well as a number of other festivals, ask their social media audience to suggest the annual fancy dress theme, which can also be done through an opinion poll of, say, five potential themes. This aspect of programming may not seem as important as the headline artists, yet it actually impacts on the festival in highly creative and visible ways. In this respect, what the crowd decides on social media can have a significant influence on the look and the feel of the event, and hence, on the festival’s ability to create a community of stakeholders who will ultimately lead to the sustainability of the event.
Many festival promoters are locked into business models that do not allow for sustainability without incremental ticket rises, capacity inflation, diversification of income streams from festival-goer expenditure, and engagement with brands through sponsorship deals. It is nigh on impossible to operate an outdoor festival in Britain, with all its associated and continually rising costs, without incorporating at least some of these measures. That is not to say that festivals cannot survive without overt commercialization; but it is difficult, and requires serious commitment. The cost of excluding an event from the benefits enjoyed by competitors can be harmful in a myriad of ways, but it can also advantageous if it becomes the unique selling point (USP), as has occurred with Shambala and Green Man. The continual increase of production and programming costs, well above the rate of inflation, ultimately means that most promoters are under significant pressure to match this increase with larger revenues. This presents a key difficulty, which is in some part ideological, because many festivals deploy authenticating notions that are inconsistent with the measures required for increasing necessary revenues. For example, in addition to raising ticket prices, one option available to promoters is increasing site capacity and ticket sales. This can present problems for festivals such as Kendal Calling, Secret Garden Party and BoomTown, which have used intimate size as a selling point during their early years of operation. This is a quality that may have to be relinquished if the event is perceived to become large, anonymous and over-commercialized. This marks a tension between the economically based need to grow and ticket-buyers’ sensitivity to growth; between the needs of the festival and the desires of the festival-goer.
As the sector has matured, the technology and operations in production have advanced, professionalized and become more complex in a trajectory that has had a knock-on effect on ticket prices. Given the level of competition in the market, there is inherent risk in inflating prices, for there is a finite amount of incremental ticket-hiking that can be done before a hard-won fanbase will look elsewhere for cheap or even free alternatives – which, in the current market, are plentiful. Godiva festival in Coventry, despite its expensive line-up of high profile artists (which in 2014 included Happy Mondays and We Are Scientists) is completely free to attend, and due to its public subsidy Bingley Music Live, near Bradford, sold tickets to its three-day festival at only £40 plus booking fee, in 2015. As well as the many cheap alternatives, problematically for the promoter, research on festival-goer attitudes points to a growing intolerance for ticket price inflation: in a 2013 survey, 25 per cent of festival-goers stated that a 5 per cent increase in ticket prices would put them off attending the same festival(s) next year, which was up from 19 per cent of respondents answering similarly the year before (UK Festival Awards Market Report 2013). However, as ticket prices do inevitably increase, the overall cost of festival attendance inevitably prices out some music fans, with the most expensive festivals often costing more than a week’s holiday abroad, especially if purchased through ticket touts. On-site expenditure has also risen as festival-goers opt to purchase the majority of their alcohol and food from official vendors, which is in part to do with restrictive alcohol policies and increased food options that encourage festival-goers to put aside bigger and bigger budgets to see them through the weekend. For the majority of festival audiences it is simply not possible to spontaneously attend without budgeting and saving up, even if the ticket itself is bought as a gift by parents, for example. The uptake of easy payment schemes shows that individuals on a budget are not necessarily willing to relinquish their festival tickets: like a car bought on finance, the ticket is important enough to warrant a long-term payment plan to facilitate the purchase. Contemporary techniques for selling festival tickets have thus begun to mimic techniques that are well established for selling other kinds of commodities in the retail and service industries, and while the notion that such schemes were set up to ‘help’ festival-goers might seem a little disingenuous, ticket prices are balanced to address what, for the majority of festivals that do not enjoy any subsidy from local authorities or arts funders, is a high production cost shouldered by the organization. Given the level of investment involved, the profit margins achievable from festival ventures are actually very slim: according to Stuart Gailbraith, of Kilimanjaro Live and Sonisphere festival, promoters can hope to make just 10 per cent in profits on top of the total cost of production (Live Music Exchange 2012). For all the millions that can be totalled from the number of tickets sold, as well as expenditures on bars and other income streams, paying for overheads such as trackway, temporary demountable structures, Portaloos and other essential infrastructure, staffing and artists, instantly absorbs the vast majority of this income. The slim profit margin also means that festival businesses are at high risk of financial catastrophe in the event of poor weather or slower-than-usual ticket sales.
Beyond the initial sale of the ticket, the ongoing diversification of festival-goer spend at festivals has become crucial to developing feasible business models able to address the inflation of production budgets. Festival merchandising, much like band merchandising, offers conspicuous consumption for it functions on the basis that attendance is both a source of pride and a form of social currency. The festival brand may be revered like a favourite band or DJ, and festivals capitalize on this by selling branded T-shirts, hoodies and tote bags, allowing wearers to continue advertising the event long after it is over. For most events, after ticket sales, the income generated by selling alcohol on licensed bars is essential to turn a profit, but this is by no means a cut and dry process. Weak bar spend has the potential to be catastrophic, even for a festival which has sold out, and this can be brought about through anything from poor security to bad weather. This means that there is a prevailing incentive among promoters to strengthen bar expenditure by preventing festival-goers from bringing their own drink into festivals, and to encourage reliance on official alcohol vendors. Limits on drink brought onto site, and bag searches in between campsites and the arena, are widely employed to this end – not only to promote safety and security and to fulfil licensing objectives, as might seem to be the official line. These tactics can appear mercenary, and indeed, festival-goers will often only tolerate a certain level of draconian drinks policies – but many in the business would argue that they are essential to survival. A stance on permissible drink that is too generous, or too weakly enforced, has the potential to be the deciding factor between a profit and a loss.
The consumption of food at music festivals has also been transformed by attempts to maximize revenue streams. The tasteless noodles, burgers and chips served up at some festivals in the 1990s have, throughout the 2000s, been gradually replaced with an extensive range of artisan foods, much of which may be sourced from local suppliers and farms. Repositioning food as part of the featured entertainment at music festivals has improved the income potential of this area of spending and, today, dining is such a popular pastime at festivals that food vendors often occupy the majority of the available vendor space. This is in line with a broader shift discernible outside of festivals as emergent metropolitan food and music events, such as the popular Friday Food Fight in Manchester, combine the pleasure of good food with a trendy, ‘scenester’ appeal. At music festivals, while it could be argued that festival-goers in the 1990s were more inclined to cook some food around a campfire, and purchase a limited quantity from site vendors, now it seems that festival-goers budget further in advance to pay for the convenience (and enjoyment!) of their meals to be served up by official vendors. This is reinforced by the available data: presented as an infographic meme on Facebook, a survey commissioned by the online takeaway service Just Eat at Ireland’s Electric Picnic found that 78 per cent of participants set aside a daily food budget of €10–€30 (meat options, burgers and chips bought from official vendors were still the most popular foods of choice), and only 7 per cent brought their own food. Just Eat is of course biased towards the promotion of convenience food, and it is not coincidental that the survey data works in favour of both Just Eat and the festival’s promoters. High expenditure on food stalls allows promoters to charge proportionately higher pitch fees, optimizing additional strands of revenue. This is one reason why there is noticeably less of the esoteric-style goods described by Chris Anderton in 2008 (40): products displaying a continuing connection to Aquarian ideals (crystals, incense, spiritual books and handmade clothing) are less abundant at British festivals than they were a decade previous. Many food stalls selling ethically sourced, organic and/or vegetarian food are the remnants of the ‘hippie’ goods vendors, reproducing, in their own way, the conscious ideals of the festival counterculture.
Figure 3.1 Pod Pads at the Deer Lodge glamping area, Kendal Calling 2013
Source: Scott Salt
Contemporary festivals have ushered in a glamorized simulacrum of a new age tradition, allowing ‘weekend hippies’ a highly expensive, touristic taste of a lifestyle that has become quite far removed from the scene. Tent accommodation may seem part and parcel of the music festival experience, producing a sense of community among festival-goers, and a ‘back to nature’ ethos. However, this area of festival culture is changing too. There is a broad shift towards dividing space into standard and premium options – much like the segmentation of other products, such as first class and economy class flights. The terminology used in the presentation of such options is usually sensitive to the festival crowd – Beatherder, for example, playfully labels its posh tipi field ‘Snooty Glamping’, and the term ‘VIP’ is avoided at many independent festivals. Somewhat ironically, it is the tipis, first visible at Glastonbury as the homes of new age travellers, that have now become expensive dwellings of choice for professional workers with money – whom are arguably embedded in the kind of reality that the original tipi occupants sought to reject. Yurts, pre-erected tents, shed-like ‘pods’ (as shown in Figure 3.1, at Kendal Calling) and hotel packages signal a shift towards providing more comfortable and luxury accommodation options, which can also be sold within broader convenience packages that include transfers, travel and tickets. These initiatives allow music festivals to expand out of a youthful, countercultural niche to appeal to a much broader audience, though at the same time, the installation of boundaries that separate festival-goers from each other in accordance to how much they have paid does signal a hierarchical form of commoditization.
Today, many music festivals are supported, whether through hard cash or services, by brands and commercial sponsors. Perhaps due to more pragmatic audiences, or an increasingly middle-class audience demographic, attitudes towards sponsorship are changing. There is a growing, minority perspective that sponsorship actually improves, rather than pollutes, festival experience: in 2012, a study of 5,000 festival-goers found that 15 per cent believed sponsorship made the overall experience more enjoyable, which increased to 23 per cent when the same question was asked in 2013. Conversely, the proportion of people who said that they feel sponsorship puts them off a festival fell from 9 to 6 per cent (The Festival Awards Market Report 2013). These statistics may be encouraging for festival promoters, yet the sensitivity of the majority to outward or excessive sponsorship means that many still proceed with caution when it comes to brand partnerships. Rather than simply not engaging with brands, and foregoing this income stream, many promoters have been careful to choose sponsors that are consistent with the event experience (such as Bulmers, a cider brand, and Rizla). There have also been great leaps in experiential marketing through the funding of tailor-made spaces and installation pieces by corporations – the gargantuan ‘picnic basket’, housing a mock-Wonkaland built by Nokia at Ireland’s Electric Picnic, is an apt example. Features like this reconcile the twin requirements of income for the festival and unique programme features for the festival-goer. For brands to access the festival crowd, therefore, they are required to provide something of functional or creative value, rather than just a poster or flyer. Though it is notoriously difficult to measure the efficacy of such efforts, the exposure holds the potential to imbue a brand with positive associations. Shifts towards diversifying income through experiential sponsorship have enhanced the experiential content at some festivals, which has blurred the lines between what the festival produces, what is produced by independent artists, and what is produced by the participating brand. Arguably though, greater levels of brand co-option have also undermined the experience of music festivals as methods for escaping commercialized society. High street brands have crept onto the festival site, while retail spaces outside of festivals have utilized their social values. Supermarket as well as clothing chains regularly stock ‘festival fashions’ that include pre-woven headdresses of fake flowers, wellingtons, rain macs, summer dresses and other accessories, marking the shift of music festivals from a subcultural scene to a conspicuously mainstream activity, while celebrity endorsements buoy the fashion-oriented dimension of festival culture.8 This mirrors a shift within some festival sites, as the addition of grooming salons and photo booths promote display and affectation. In many ways, the co-option of festival fashion by the clothing industries has followed the same trajectory of the traveller’s tipi: the motifs of the festival counterculture have been converted and commoditized for mainstream appeal. The culture has been absorbed and resold as something reminiscent of the past, but altered to emphasize the glamorous and voyeuristic parts of the scene.
1 eFestivals is a popular source of information and discussion relating to British music festivals (efestivals.co.uk).
2 It should be pointed out that a dramatic increase in stadium concerts was responsible for the steep growth of stadium event expenditure in 2011, including stadium tours like Take That’s Progress Live.
3 The long-standing trajectory of Glastonbury, particularly when compared with the short life of Woodstock in the United States, supports the theory that the event has greatly influenced, over time, the size and nature of British festival culture. Although Woodstock was launched with far larger numbers of attendees than the early Glastonbury festivals, it did not evolve into a regular festival. Four months after it was staged, violence, disorder and the deaths of four festival-goers at Altamont, attended by 300,000 and headlined by the Rolling Stones, became a symbol for the ‘death of Woodstock Nation’ (Lytle 2006, 336). A loss of faith in the festival format could explain why festival culture seems a more recent development in the United States: leading US based music and arts festivals Coachella and Lollapalooza, for example, were launched much later than Glastonbury – in 1999 and 1991, respectively.
4 Since its launch and proliferation, Spotify’s use of recordings has become highly controversial. Notoriously the pop artist Taylor Swift, in 2014, pulled her music from the platform, suggesting that it inadequately rewards writers, performers and producers (see Swift 2014).
5 See Michael Eavis on ‘the headliner problem’ (Cooper 2014), and the cited reasons for the cancellation of metal festival Sonisphere in 2015 (Guardian Music 2015).
6 There does, however, appear to be a growing backlash to the homogeneity of PR-based promo-cover, with headlines such as ‘Hell on Earth (AKA V Festival)’, Vice (Haynes 2011), ‘Wireless Festival is a Depressing Insight Into the Future of British Festivals’ and ‘Why I’ve Stopped Losing My Shit Over Reading Festival’s Line-up Announcements’, Noisey (Bassil 2014; Roper 2014), presenting more cynical perspectives. Articles like this share some similarity in that they voice indignation at what is perceived to be the rip-off, cattle-market quality of over-commercialized events.
7 The festival scenes were set to be filmed at MFest, an event organized by the supermarket chain Morrisons, which was going to be staged on the same site as regular filming on the Harewood estate in Yorkshire. However, MFest was cancelled due to warnings of heavy rain, and Emmerdale was required to create its own artificial festival scenes for filming.
8 In 2013, for example, the ubiquitous high street label Topshop created The Road to Coachella, a video-advertorial featuring Kate Bosworth posing in a range of clothes targeted at young festival-goers.