Maybe Fewer Festivals Wouldn't Be a Bad Thing
a.k.a. Cataloging the pluses and minuses of today's festival-heavy landscape, and imagining what a different future might look like.
Music festivals have hit a rough patch. Ticket sales are down, costs are up, credit is hard to come by and promoters are starting to panic. Earlier this year, a group called The Association of Independent Festivals launched a running list of events that have either cancelled their 2024 editions or decided to close up shop altogether—the tally currently includes 60 different festivals, and that’s just in the UK. Promoters in other countries may not be as well organized when it comes to sounding the alarm, but in a year when a landmark festival like Germany’s Melt has officially called it quits, and even a billionaire-backed event like Australia’s Dark Mofo presented a seriously slimmed-down music program, it’s fair to say that these troubles aren’t limited to any region in particular.
Last week, another wave of festival-related anxiety ran through the music industry, thanks to a new poll conducted by Pirate Studios. The company, which offers short-term studio rentals across the UK and in select cities in the US, Ireland and Germany—claims to have surveyed 1700 music fans in the UK about their festival plans for the year, and found that a whopping 44% of them “indicated that they’re attending fewer festivals in 2024.” Their report also included some less foreboding figures, including a finding that 47% of respondents were “still planning to attend at least two festivals this year, and 10% committed to four or more.”
However, when the news hit the wire, it was the “44% of fans are spending less on festivals” stat that got top billing. Nearly identical stories appeared in Resident Advisor, Mixmag, DJ Mag, The Quietus, Clash and several other publications, all of them amplifying the idea that the Pirate Studios survey offered concrete proof of just how precarious things have become for the festival industry. Not surprisingly, those same stories neglected to mention that Pirate Studios shared only a small selection of cherry-picked statistics, and also didn’t make public either its full data set or the methodologies it used to collect that data in the first place. (The media outlets also failed to acknowledge the degree to which their own business models are tied to the festival industry, either through commissions on ticket sales or direct advertising revenue.)
Without more information, it’s difficult to know if the Pirate poll has any real significance. But even if the company is given the benefit of the doubt, and we extrapolate that music fans in not just the UK, but all over the world, are actively deciding NOT to spend as much of their limited disposable income on festivals, there remains one crucial question that neither the music press or the wider music industry has bothered to answer:
Are we sure that’s a bad thing?