Bestival 2017

[FloorFiller]

9 minutes ago, Circus-Freak said:

Rip Bestival.

long live Bestival

[Circus-Freak]

Really? Steady ticket sales decline, lack of response (from public) to social media posts/adverts for the radio shows etc

On 21/12/2016 at 10:34 PM, FloorFiller said:

long live Bestival

 (both Bestival and rob da bank). 

More fashionable festivals, with great line ups, that fill to capacity.

Id give it Two more years til it gets pulled.

 

[Tom12]

On 31/12/2016 at 6:57 PM, Circus-Freak said:

Really? Steady ticket sales decline, lack of response (from public) to social media posts/adverts for the radio shows etc

 (both Bestival and rob da bank). 

More fashionable festivals, with great line ups, that fill to capacity.

Id give it Two more years til it gets pulled.

 

Name the more fashionable festivals?

 

[lofichic]

We've never done Bestival before, but as we didn't get Glastonbury tickets we thought it was a sign to branch out and try something new. With it moving to Dorset we decided we'd give it a crack and got tickets last week. I think the move might just bring a new crowd in? It's always been the Isle of Wight that's put me off going...

[eFestivals]

9 hours ago, Tom12 said:

Name the more fashionable festivals?

 

boomtown.

As proven by it selling out, and selling twice the number of tix Bestival did last year.

Having been to both myself, I know Boomtown isn't fluking it.

[Tom12]

On 04/01/2017 at 9:08 AM, eFestivals said:

boomtown.

As proven by it selling out, and selling twice the number of tix Bestival did last year.

Having been to both myself, I know Boomtown isn't fluking it.

Knew that somone would say that haha so is it just the one festival stopping bestival selling out? 

[eFestivals]

26 minutes ago, Tom12 said:

Knew that somone would say that haha so is it just the one festival stopping bestival selling out? 

there's a whole host of reasons, including the fact that festivals are falling out of fashion to a significant extent, and the ioW being (comparatively) a bugger to get to.

But boomtown is one of the biggest reasons, because there doesn't seem to be a massive number to 'the party crowd' that bestival was attracting last time I went (a while back now), and I'd say that crowd has now moved on to bestival in much the same way that bestival crowd had moved on from The Big Chill.

The party thing is always transitory, a passing fad. It comes and then it goes, faster than fashions do in the wider sense.

[Matt42]

15 minutes ago, eFestivals said:

there's a whole host of reasons, including the fact that festivals are falling out of fashion to a significant extent, 

 

 

gonna say I disagree with you there

The age of the big festival is going out of fashion - the smaller festivals, Parklife, Field Day, Lovebox, Secret Garden Party & international festivals are becoming bigger.

I'm seeing a lot more people tie up a holiday and a festival together - killing two birds with one stone

But I think Reading, IOW, T In The Park, V Festival being the big guns who the youth's chuck their money at are coming to an end.

Boomtown is growing in popularity because there's a greater attraction now to places that are more than just a festival, gone are the days where all you need is a big band to sell loads of tickets

Glastonbury is separating into a slightly different entity now - I guess Bestival is just feeling the weight of what happened to IOW

Edited January 5, 2017 by Matt42

[eFestivals]

46 minutes ago, Matt42 said:

gonna say I disagree with you there

The age of the big festival is going out of fashion - the smaller festivals, Parklife, Field Day, Lovebox, Secret Garden Party & international festivals are becoming bigger.

two errors there.

It takes maybe ten smaller festivals to replace one big festival, and even the number of smaller events is shrinking. And at least one of the events you've mentioned there is struggling rather than getting bigger.

I'd love it if what you say there were true - after all, my livelihood depends on festivals being successful.

[Tom12]

Anyone think possibly it's something to do with decorated stages and areas? Bestival f**ked up with that last year big time with the space port being a bit of scaffold haha they could have at least wrapped it up with something to make it look like a rocket... Boom town on the other hand has some awesome looking stages and areas, lions den being an awesome looking one! 

 

Back when bestival had the red bull stage (which would change every year) and when they had the swamp shack, reggae roots and the port Bestival seemed to be doing better 

[2853rob]

Hung up my Bestival boots after the anouncement to move as i had already committed to Camp Bestival and we couldnt afford to travel from the island and pay camper van fees etc twice. After attending 9 i had bought an earlybird out of habit (before the anouncement) as even though the last one was very poor i felt i had to support the event as its on my doorstep and this year would be better.

So it was very easy to cancel and get refunded but still very sad its moving but these things happen

My prediction for the future is Camp Bestival and Bestival will merge in the next few years as last years Camp Bestival was a bit "spend ten pounds and make it look like eleven"

[jackarmy]

3 hours ago, 2853rob said:

Hung up my Bestival boots after the anouncement to move as i had already committed to Camp Bestival and we couldnt afford to travel from the island and pay camper van fees etc twice. After attending 9 i had bought an earlybird out of habit (before the anouncement) as even though the last one was very poor i felt i had to support the event as its on my doorstep and this year would be better.

So it was very easy to cancel and get refunded but still very sad its moving but these things happen

My prediction for the future is Camp Bestival and Bestival will merge in the next few years as last years Camp Bestival was a bit "spend ten pounds and make it look like eleven"

Good call. I said after Bestival this year to RDB that I thought they were trying to run too many festivals, and not really getting it spot on at any of them. They need to get back to what made them successful in the first place...

[eFestivals]

18 minutes ago, jackarmy said:

They need to get back to what made them successful in the first place.

I'd say the chance has gone, tho I hope I'm proven wrong. 

What made it successful in the first place was it's better-than-Big-Chill format, which nicked the Big Chill crowd.  Now someone else has done the same to Bestival.

Some festivals are more tightly fashionable than others, and when the fashion moves on there's rarely any going back.

 

[Guy Incognito]

Speaking as someone who lives 8 miles from where Boomtown is held (apart from when at uni) I have to agree that Boomtown's success has had an affect on Bestival.  Every summer my group tended to chose Boomtown over Bestival and as the years have gone on it seems more people I know from school/college etc have chosen Boom. Some years we did both but most of my group of mates never miss Boomtown whereas we now don't even really consider going to Bestival despite the fact that it has always been pretty easy for us to get to. 

At first there was probably about the same number of people that i knew going to Bestival and Boomtown but now that has shifted and far more people go to boomtown. I was staggered how many people I bumped into this year that i knew from college and weren't in the group I went with.  

People are definitely more drawn to the idea of Boomtown, a sprawling festival (that doesnt have an arena) with tonnes more to do than Bestival. I think Boomtown is now seen as the cool/interesting festival to do, which perhaps Bestival was back in the earlier 2010's. I don't think we should underestimate how important the community aspect is to young people going to festivals. I know quite a lot of people who know next to nothing about music but attend Boomtown every year just because a lot of people they know go and because you're guaranteed to have fun regardless of the line up.

Edited January 6, 2017 by rhg_99

[Paul ™]

^^ spot on, exact same for me and my large group of friends who went to Bestival about 7-8 years ago almost every year.

The group I now go to Boomtown with is expanding every year (I've only been twice but some have been 4-5 times) and we have even more going this year. And more and more of the Bestival crowd we met up with now go to Boomtown too, with less going to Bestival.

It seems to evolve every year (even the huge Banghai Palace thats only been there twice) is going and something far bigger and better will no doubt take over its space) and along with the Sector 6 area last year, continues to expand along a plot/storyline and the effort they put in to the sets/theatrical stuff puts every UK festival to shame.

Bestival was fun, but IMO got too greedy and failed to evolve to stay popular with my group and no doubt many others going by what's being said now.

Edited January 6, 2017 by Paul ™

[Guy Incognito]

11 minutes ago, Paul ™ said:

Bestival was fun, but IMO got too greedy and failed to evolve to stay popular with my group and no doubt many others going by what's being said now.

yeh this is a good point. I feel like Bestival was a victim of its own success. Perhaps the fact that within a couple years of it starting it started to grow quite rapidly in size (17,000 in 2006 to 29,000 in 2007) made it suffer in the long term. Boomtown, unlike Bestival, has always been based on the small venues and pop up city aesthetic. When I first went in 2013 there was nothing like Banghai Palace, the Lions Den was there but was smaller and in a different, more enclosed part of the festival.

To be fair I've only been to Bestival once (in 2014) but it doesnt seem like it has much opportunity for growth, nowhere near in the same way Boomtown does where they've cleverly built up year by year whilst retaining what makes it really special and original.

Edited January 6, 2017 by rhg_99

[eFestivals]

9 minutes ago, Paul ™ said:

Bestival  ....  failed to evolve to stay popular with my group and no doubt many others going by what's being said now.

I'd have thought Bestival's 'evolution' might have suited you & yours to an extent ... or at least, more-so than it did the majority of the 'party crowd' it used to attract.

I think I thought it was a good idea at the time, but with hindsight it was probably a terrible mistake to have booked The Cure as a headliner. For that 'party crowd' it perhaps couldn't have got further away from what they wanted unless they'd filled the stages with metal.

While headliners aren't everything about a festival, they are the acts that get most noticed and talked about. For a 'party crowd' that has a big yearly turnover/churn, when considering whether to go, looking back to see something like that at the top of the bill is probably quite off-putting to 'party crowd' possible-newbies.

Edited January 6, 2017 by eFestivals

[zahidf]

they had my bloody valentine 2 years before though, which could have been even more off putting to the party people.

I think when it started getting muddy didnt help either. 

[hoils]

Yeah, I was going to bring up MBV as an example of RDB being pretty eclectic with headliners from the start. You could argue the same with The Magic Numbers and Gogol Bordello, too. 2009 headliners of Massive Attack, Kraftwerk and Elbow didn't exactly shout out '10 pills a night at the main stage'  either.

I think the crowd for the first 3 or 4 years was very 'Big Chilly' and then has got a little younger and party-centric each year. Or maybe I've just got older. 

 

 

 

 

[Circus-Freak]

The first 5-6 Bestivals had amazing atmosphere, very friendly and had a sense of unity.

Then it got corporate, even the security turned into w*nkers and the chilled out easy feeling atmosphere died when the money men became involved.

Bestival is dead as far as I'm concerned. No matter how it will be dressed up from now.

Shame.

[LottieRB]

Will be taking a break this year, at least to allow for a bedding in period and I want to experience Boomtown. Sad to see it move (my fam live on the Island and me in Notts so I can see it from both sides), and I don't think the ferry fares were the final nail. As per prev posts, I agree that Boomtown being in Winchester and having had an amazing run over the years has turned the tide (whaaaaay). Headliners sure as hell played a part still - constantly seeing early bird bought tickets being offered up from Island pals on FB was a bit worrying on the run up once S.Paul / Whizz were announced

Bestival seemed to have a headline formula for mixing the genres that seems to have been lost for 2016 i.e. 2011 Bjork / The Cure / Pendulum. Would like to see Grace Jones invited along one year perhaps...but will settle getting up to see the Cuban Bros year in, year out...just not this year.

 

 

[2853rob]

1 hour ago, LottieRB said:

Will be taking a break this year, at least to allow for a bedding in period and I want to experience Boomtown. Sad to see it move (my fam live on the Island and me in Notts so I can see it from both sides), and I don't think the ferry fares were the final nail. As per prev posts, I agree that Boomtown being in Winchester and having had an amazing run over the years has turned the tide (whaaaaay). Headliners sure as hell played a part still - constantly seeing early bird bought tickets being offered up from Island pals on FB was a bit worrying on the run up once S.Paul / Whizz were announced

Bestival seemed to have a headline formula for mixing the genres that seems to have been lost for 2016 i.e. 2011 Bjork / The Cure / Pendulum. Would like to see Grace Jones invited along one year perhaps...but will settle getting up to see the Cuban Bros year in, year out...just not this year.

 

 

Totally agree about your comment on the ferries there is a bit more to it all than that, i mean for so many years they got it just right and then got it really wrong sad its leaving the island though as we wont see anything like it again here

[eFestivals]

just heard that the arena at Bestival is currently shut down, due to high winds and wet site. It might reopen later, apparently.

[Tr234]

How has it been this year? Haven't been since 2015 and would like to return next year if I here good stuff from the new site

[eFestivals]

it was shut just less than an hour (from tweet times).

Whatever the issue was, they've got on top of it.