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the eFestivals blog

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What kind of f**kery is this? - Amy Winehouse RIP

I'm not one to get all mawkish about the death of someone I don't know. And if you try juggling knives then why be surprised if they cut you? She did what she did and the consequences are hers. All the same - and I don't say this lightly - the world of music has lost a huge talent. In the 13 years I've been writing about festivals and the acts I've seen there, I can't think of any act who's talent has jumped out and grabbed me in such a strong way as Amy Winehouse. I first saw Amy and hear

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Neil

what do you see in the Mirror....?

eFestivals was approached by a newspaper journo - a freelancer, working for one of the nationals - the other day, after some festival information. There's nowt special about that as it often happens, however... What was rather 'special' was this journo's approach. The normal deal - a deal that is requested explicitly from them, but which is also what they know is the case for this sort of thing - is that eFestivals helps them with their research, and eFestivals gets a mention in the article f

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WaterAid - eFestivals chosen charity

As some of you might be aware, eFestivals is committed to giving 1% of turnover (turnover, not profit) to charity, and our chosen charity is WaterAid. I've just given them another sizable donation (the second this year) as a result. Thanks goes to every user of eFestivals - without your support of eFestivals, this just wouldn't be possible. WaterAid is an international charity dedicated to helping people escape the stranglehold of poverty and disease caused by living without safe water a

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Wanted not wanted?

I'd say not, but as I've only viewed it from the M1 what do I know? Is there much to love about Luton? Anyway, the 'Love Luton' event - I hesitate to use the word 'festival' - offers a line-up including The Wanted. And Olly Murs. I can't say it's top of my own list of where to go this summer. Tickets are now £15, and anyone who bought at ticket at the previous higher price will be sent a free extra ticket.

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very Beautiful Days

god, I needed that sleep. What can I say? I don't think I've enjoyed a festival that much in ages. But next time, they need to book Steel Pulse for a 3 hour set.

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upgrades

eFestivals has been moved to a new server, to help ensure that on the busiest days everything will still cope. Fingers crossed that the new configurations works as well as hoped for.

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twice as big, half as good?

The cancellation of some of the more major festivals this year have brought a lot of easy headlines for newspapers and the music press, with a raft of reasons suggested as the cause - the olympics, the recession, poor bookings, expensive tickets, and the like. Those things are of course in the mix and it would be foolish to dismiss the effect they have, but there's much more going on to effect the festivals scene than just those. Back in 2006 I wrote this article titled "Regulation, Retro

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tonight's the night...

... when everyone should be watching the footie, and defo not tuning into Radio 1 at 9pm for their show "In music we trust...", which tonight is titled "Radio 1's Ultimate Festival Guide" and will probably include yours truly blabbering on about festies.

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time to get busy

The festival announcements season starts hard and fast today with at least four biggies being announced this week.

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ticks on the list

I've been working thru a list of to-do's since the end of the summer, putting in place certain things for the new year for eFestivals. As ever with these sorts of things getting thru the list never quite goes as fast as hoped for, but even so much of the stuff is now sorted. One of the more important things is sorted, and that's new staff for certain tasks. There's a new full-timer who's going to be having a big role, plus another part-timer who I've been bugging for a while and who is now in

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thieving bastards

just gone outside to my car, to find the side window smashed and my stereo nicked

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there's so much bullshit around here

eFestivals has had a problem for a while with a certain music-based publicity company having their staff making publicity posts here. The terms & conditions of the use of these forums is that they're not to be used for commercial purposes. To try to get around that, these staff have made numerous registrations in the normal sorts of usernames that genuine users use, and then made their posts in a deceptive manner, in a "have you heard the latest album by XXXXX? It's superb, check it out"

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the scores on the doors

I've just received a Comscore report for hit stats for websites that fall into the "Entertainment - music" category. I knew that eFestivals had a significantly greater amount of traffic than many other better known general music websites, but up until this point I hadn't realised by quite how much!!!! eFestivals comes in at number 35 in the list, but many of the sites listed above it aren't really in the same market - things like yahoo music, myspace, seeklyrics.com, last.fm, napster, etc. I

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the incompetence of BT

eFestivals moved premises in mid-January. A move of phone services from one premises to another should be an easy task for any competent business to manage. And yet... - BT took the order wrongly. - BT failed to fulfil the order properly. - BT did the bits they did several days later than they should have. - The engineer did a dreadful job, requiring the wiring in both my house and the exchange to need to be re-done. - it was near-impossible to get them to send that diferent engineer,

Neil

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the fuss about flags - a different take on things.

There's been a big fuss about flags this summer, with many people complaining that their enjoyment of acts at festivals have been spoilt by the huge number of people in front of them in the crowd with flags, blocking their view of the stage. They have a point - at times, particularly at Glastonbury's main stage, this long-running problem stepped very firmly into the realms of huge excess. Why do some people have these flags? At the most simple level, they have them because they think it's a

Neil

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the eFestivals app for Android

I'm really pleased that I've succeeded in knocking together a comprehensive and free Android app for eFestivals. You can download it here:- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nrgi.efestivals

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the cult of celebrity

The last few weeks have shown that we as a society have sunk incrediably low into the cult of celebrity. People are trying to censor others reasonable opinions on the actions of these celebrities, as tho the only thing allowed is star worship. And thinking back 50 years, we used to take the piss out of the cult of leadership in dictatorships: at least those leaders had a real effect on people's lives of more than fluff.

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the bullshit of boutique

"Boutique" is being applied to festivals attended by numbers from 500 to 50,000. So what does it mean? From Dictionary.com:- bou·tique [boo-teek] –noun 1. a small shop or a small specialty department within a larger store, esp. one that sells fashionable clothes and accessories or a special selection of other merchandise. 2. any small, exclusive business offering customized service: Our advertising is handled by a new Madison Avenue boutique. 3. Informal. a small business, departm

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that's another summer gone....

Well, that's another summer that's been and gone, with just a few more outdoor fests left before the weather gets bad. Except the weather is bad already - in fact did it ever get good? That's two summers on the trot where it's been generally awful. Hopefully it's all been due to La Niña, which is normally a two-year weather event and started in early 2007, which means that it's likely that next year will be back to a normal British summer (Yes, that means it rains, but also means it doesn't

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system upgrades to servers

I've spent most of today updating the system software on the eFestivals servers (which explains why they've gone off-line occasionally today, if you were wondering), and despite my novice knowledge of linux they've all gone exceedingly well. The newer server is all completed, but there's still some stuff to do for the older one. Because its an older installation and hadn't been updated before (whoops ) there's still a little more to do... Back to it.

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so long and thanks for the smiles

:) There's a small handful of people without whom eFestivals wouldn't exist. Very sadly one of these passed away at the weekend, and she'll be sorely missed by me and her many friends but more importantly by her children and husband.

Neil

Neil

slowing down / thinking forwards

well, things are starting to slow down at eFestivals now - there's finally time to breathe - as most of the announcements about festivals for this year have been made, so there's not so much in the way of news and updates each day. But even with the extra resources that eFestivals now has there's still lots and lots to do, with the chance (finally!) to catch up on some of the things that have been put to the side - sometimes for several years - because there's just not been enough hours in th

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signs of the summer

So this year the bubble has well and truly burst. Alongside the new festivals that failed to get off the ground there were also some established names that failed completely or suffered from lower sales. Meanwhile, the better festivals held their own or grew as they were hoping to do. So what happens when Mean Fiddler's Festival Republic's Melvin Benn gets asked about the trends this summer? He doesn't pick on the festivals that suffered, but instead comments that he's heard that sales were d

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server tuning part 4

The new server is now in place, which adds around 80% to the load capacity that was available last Monday when the Reading/Leeds tickets went on sale. Had this new server been in place on Monday, then I believe that no issues would have been experienced by people using the site at that time. And as there were around 50% more users online simultaneously on Monday across the whole website than this website has experienced previously and things mostly ran OK, I think that's a pretty good indicat

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server tuning part 3

Yesterday was announcement & ticket day for Reading & Leeds festivals, and eFestivals had a new record for the number of users. There were around 40% more users than there were for the previous record, and (mostly) the servers coped better than they did for the previous record. There were still some issues tho. One of the servers that has been problematic over the last month didn't operate as it should, and led to things slowing down when it shouldn't have - the servers could and shou

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Neil

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