The Price of Transparency
a.k.a. The Waking Life festival ran into financial trouble—and decided to open up its accounting ledgers.
The 2023 edition of the Waking Life festival lost approximately €400,000.
Last week the festival’s organizers readily shared the information as part of an announcement in which they not only copped to the loss, but also admitted that they will be “royally screwed” without immediate financial support. They’re hoping that a significant chunk of that support will come from members of the public, who they’ve asked to help them “navigate this financially stormy weather” by either making donations or purchasing tickets early for Waking Life 2024.
I’ve never been to Waking Life, and in all likelihood, I probably never will. Driving into the middle of nowhere to camp out with thousands of other people at what’s ostensibly a week-long nature rave is not my personal idea of a good time, no matter how good the lineup is or how incredible the vibes are purported to be. That said, I’m just one person, and the event—which began in 2017 and takes place each summer outside of Crato, a small town in a relatively remote corner of Portugal—is frequently touted as one of the “good” festivals, at least by electronic music folks in the know. In his gushing review of the 2023 edition, DJ / label owner / newsletter writer Joe Delon invited readers to imagine being “treated to some of the most inspiring music and personal interactions you can remember at a festival,” and went on to say, “the sheer abundance of both these things [was] almost too much to bear, so rich has the experience been.” When reading about Waking Life, these kinds of testimonials are commonplace.
This level of enthusiasm is undoubtedly bolstered by the fact that Waking Life is operated by a Portugal-based non-profit organization, and actively markets itself not as a money-making exercise, or even as just a festival, but a “multidimensional community project, with budding cultural, countercultural and agricultural initiatives.” Waking Life doesn’t work with corporate sponsors, yet it offers free tickets to Crato residents and discounted tickets to anyone facing a “difficult financial situation, whether due to personal circumstance or the economic context of the country you live in (such as the one in Portugal).” Since 2019, the organization has also committed a portion of its annual revenue to land regeneration, contributing to an effort to turn “the festival grounds (35 hectares) into a biodiverse public park, where flora and fauna grow into vibrant new ecosystems.”
On paper, all of that sounds pretty good, especially when compared to how most festivals operate. Waking Life, however, is not perfect. During its first year, it was hit with some particularly bad press when attendees were hit by a mystery illness that left scores of people suffering from vomiting and diarrhea. That may have just been bad luck—subsequent editions have had no such problems—but even once Waking Life’s various environmental efforts are factored in, this is still an event that brings in hundreds of artists and crew members each year, and also attracts thousands of attendees; most of these folks are not locals, or even Portuguese, and when all the flights and car rides are added up, the festival’s carbon footprint doesn’t look great. And while the town of Crato undoubtedly gets a financial boost from the festival, the prevailing dynamic, in which relatively poorer countries / communities are transformed into temporary party playgrounds for more privileged promoters, artists and attendees—most of them from the UK and northern Europe—isn’t something to celebrate, no matter how common the practice has become in recent years. (Also see: almost every single summertime electronic music festival in Croatia.)
Things like this are why it’s difficult to describe Waking Life—or any festival of its ilk—as a truly “good” operation. Something like “less bad than most festivals, but still problematic” would probably be more accurate, but I suppose those same qualifiers apply to just about any cultural activity these days, which is why I’m not particularly interested in hashing out a thorough moral and ethical accounting of Waking Life. In truth, I’d like to think of myself as something of a neutral observer, someone who’s not emotionally invested in the festival’s continued existence, but who also isn’t actively rooting for its failure. Truth be told, I have particularly strong feelings either way.
Why then am I devoting an entire article to Waking Life? Just because it lost money? Festivals do that all the time. (First Floor readers may remember my piece from earlier this year about crypto social club Friends with Benefits, which highlighted that the organization’s inaugural summer festival, FWB FEST, last year also lost approximately €400,000. The similarity of the figure is just a coincidence, although it’s worth reiterating that FWB somehow managed to lose that much at an event designed for only 500 attendees. This year’s Waking Life had 10 times as many people in attendance.)
No, my passion for this topic is rooted in one thing: my enthusiasm for new information. When Waking Life unveiled its financial shortfall last week, its organizers made the relatively unprecedented decision to back up their announcement with a moderate dose of financial transparency. More specifically, they published an entire financial report detailing Waking Life’s annual gains and losses for all seven years the festival has been in operation.
That report didn’t stop armchair critics from opining about exactly where and how the organization went wrong—it’s amazing how many festival operations experts there are on social media—but it did provide an illuminating window into not only how much putting on an event like Waking Life costs, but how those costs have changed over time. Could the festival have provided more details and a more complete breakdown of its accounting history? Probably, but in a space where promoters rarely share anything but the sunniest of figures, and are generally pressured to publicly project nothing but success at all times, the degree to which Waking Life elected to open up its books was unexpected.
(For the sake of comparison, check out the relatively paltry details provided by promoters in this 2022 Resident Advisor feature, which was written by Michael Lawson and commissioned by Elijah, who was guest editing the site at the time. Even in the context of specifically talking about “the costs behind club nights,” people in the electronic music world are very reluctant to talk about this stuff.)
The Waking Life numbers weren’t complete, but they did represent a solid batch of data, and since I had a bit of time on my hands during the past few days, I decided to take a closer look and see what I could find.