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fashions come and go


Neil

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With yet another festival (Blissfields) having fallen by the wayside for this year, it's pretty clear that fashions are changing.

Blissfields hasn't been hugely ambitious and had (in comparison to other fests) a good offering at a good price, but this was an unfortunate year to go for it - many established festivals appear to suffering a downturn in sales, and i wouldn't be surprised to see a big-name established fest fall this year (it might happen this year but might well not be back next year) as well as other newer events struggling.

eFestivals is of the opinion that the festival peak was three summers ago - the following year held its own, and the drop last year was somewhat hidden by and blamed on the awful weather. While the weather last summer is further affecting sales this year, we don't think it is only the weather that is responsible for the fall-off in the popularity of festivals; they're falling out of fashion and the next few years will show this more clearly.

We expect the coming trend to include (proportionally) fewer advance ticket sales, which of course will make it harder for smaller promoters to run an event, with people making their decisions to attend nearer to an event, in part based on weather forecasts, but also due to a more casual attitude to festrival attendance. It's going to require some promoters to hold their nerve despite the poorer advance sales, but even that won't be enough to save some events into the future.

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Are you seeing any significant drop off in interweb usage of the site Neil? I would have thought that would be an interesting indicator ; if usage levels are around the same as previous years then it might be the case that the same individuals are going to fewer festivals, rather than fewer individuals.

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Are you seeing any significant drop off in interweb usage of the site Neil? I would have thought that would be an interesting indicator ; if usage levels are around the same as previous years then it might be the case that the same individuals are going to fewer festivals, rather than fewer individuals.

nope, there's no drop-off in site usage (the numbers are still going up), but I wouldn't really expect there to be - as 'net usage becomes more common (and easier via broadband) more people use the net to find out about things. There has been a smaller growth in use this year compared to all previous years tho.

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Neil, do you think that T, Reading, Leeds will always sell out or do you think that it could also start to effect these, 12 months ago I would have predicted that Glastonbury will always sell out but possibly with the lower numbers for Reading/Leeds and T, are they always guaranteed to sell out?

Does Download make a significant profit, thats me thinking aloud by the way not asking if you have insider knowledge.

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Neil, do you think that T, Reading, Leeds will always sell out or do you think that it could also start to effect these, 12 months ago I would have predicted that Glastonbury will always sell out but possibly with the lower numbers for Reading/Leeds and T, are they always guaranteed to sell out?

Does Download make a significant profit, thats me thinking aloud by the way not asking if you have insider knowledge.

i think the boom in live music is to some extent over .... I'd go as far as to say that the durge that certain mags often promote as worthwhile music has come back and bit it on the arse.

But the likes of T, Reading/Leeds, and V fest will probably continue to do well, as it's line-ups that sell the tickets and with these fests being run by the biggest promoters able to pay the highest fees and use those fees to tie the acts to exclusive or semi-exclusive deals, they'll continue to get the most popular acts and sell their tickets because of that.

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