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Future of festivals...


Sawdusty surfer
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I did actually wonder whether Glastonbury would be tempted not to have a resale in October and go with a slightly reduced capacity.  (Not sure there would have been too many returns so probably won’t make a huge difference)

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45 minutes ago, sisco said:

I did actually wonder whether Glastonbury would be tempted not to have a resale in October and go with a slightly reduced capacity.  (Not sure there would have been too many returns so probably won’t make a huge difference)

On one hand this wouldn’t surprise me, if they’d sold all the tickets and then had to row back on the attendance that would be an absolute nightmare for them and us. On the other hand I can’t see what difference it would actually make. You’d still get packed venues and tents, presumably they’d have less acts anyway with a lower attendance, the finances just wouldn’t stack up to have the same size festival with a lower attendance so it’s all relative. I really think festivals are quite binary when it comes to Covid, they just aren’t compatible with the concept of needing to social distance in any sort of way. They just don’t happen, or they happen completely normally.

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14 hours ago, Zoo Music Girl said:

I'm ticketless so I hate to say it, but reducing capacity would be a sensible way to make the festival safer. It's already very overcrowded at certain points of the day in some areas.

Less tickets=less money=fewer acts=fewer stages =same crowd density at remaining stages.

Would reduce the chances of the virus getting on site in the first place, but really would only take a handful of people for it to spread like crazy. 

There wont be a new normal for festivals crowd wise, the only thing they could realistically do is pre screening, vaccination certificates or something like that, otherwise the finances fall over pretty quick. 

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2 minutes ago, Old_Johno said:

Less tickets=less money=fewer acts=fewer stages =same crowd density at remaining stages.

Would reduce the chances of the virus getting on site in the first place, but really would only take a handful of people for it to spread like crazy. 

There wont be a new normal for festivals crowd wise, the only thing they could realistically do is pre screening, vaccination certificates or something like that, otherwise the finances fall over pretty quick. 

You could quite easily have fewer, venues with larger arenas for less money, so you could reduce the crowding by reconfiguring the way the money is spent and having fewer people there.

But I'm inclined to agree with @Deaf Nobby Burton on this, the changes they could realistically make aren't likely to move the needle significantly in terms of virus safety, even if it would be noticeably less busy - not that I'm convinced it would be that much less busy from holding back some resale tickets.

And they'd still have to hit a minimum bar to pay for all the land rental, which has got to be a significant amount of the cost hasn't it?

The question is, will they know by October? Or will the 2021 resale happen at the normal resale time as they wait and see how the virus progresses into next year?

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9 hours ago, stuartbert two hats said:

You could quite easily have fewer, venues with larger arenas for less money, so you could reduce the crowding by reconfiguring the way the money is spent and having fewer people there.

But I'm inclined to agree with @Deaf Nobby Burton on this, the changes they could realistically make aren't likely to move the needle significantly in terms of virus safety, even if it would be noticeably less busy - not that I'm convinced it would be that much less busy from holding back some resale tickets.

And they'd still have to hit a minimum bar to pay for all the land rental, which has got to be a significant amount of the cost hasn't it?

The question is, will they know by October? Or will the 2021 resale happen at the normal resale time as they wait and see how the virus progresses into next year?

Having less people is irrelevant as everyone’s going to bunch together at the front, people pushing through to crowds to get a better spot is bad enough when everyone’s squashed up, try telling 80,000 drunk people to observe a 2m bubble when their favourite band is on and there’s loads of gaps everywhere.

The economics and profit margins of festivals are a pretty fine line, can’t just go around taking chunks out of ticket revenue.

I think normal resale and if they have to cancel it again it would be a full cancel as it’s a fallow year 2022 I believe? 

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2 minutes ago, gooner1990 said:

The next fallow was due to be 2024, I wonder if they will now push that back to 2025? 

I feel like they've announced that somewhere but I couldn't find confirmation of it.... perhaps it is what we've presumed on here!

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1 minute ago, vintagelaureate said:

I feel like they've announced that somewhere but I couldn't find confirmation of it.... perhaps it is what we've presumed on here!

I know they said 2020 was to be treated as a fallow but I don’t think they’ve announced when the next one will be if it’s changed from 2024 

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12 minutes ago, stuartbert two hats said:

I don't think the fallow is in the license.

yeah, it's definitely not. Licencing law doesn't allow for it - there's only an ongoing yearly licence, or individual event licences.

As long as they take a year off now and then, everyone seems to be happy ... so I'm just about certain the next fallow will be 2026.

Edited by Neil
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If you look at the posted accounts for the 2 relevant companies (GFL and GFEL) - during the last fallow year they posted a loss of several million quid. And that one was planned for years ahead - this year is likely to be significantly more expensive as there'll be a decent amount of sunk costs.

The accounts suggest that they do have enough cash in the bank that they can cope with that, to an extent - but it's exceptionally unlikely they'd choose to have another fallow year for a while. The next one will be 2026ish, once they've been able to rebuild the buffer.

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On 6/12/2020 at 11:19 AM, incident said:

If you look at the posted accounts for the 2 relevant companies (GFL and GFEL) - during the last fallow year they posted a loss of several million quid. And that one was planned for years ahead - this year is likely to be significantly more expensive as there'll be a decent amount of sunk costs.

The accounts suggest that they do have enough cash in the bank that they can cope with that, to an extent - but it's exceptionally unlikely they'd choose to have another fallow year for a while. The next one will be 2026ish, once they've been able to rebuild the buffer.

Signs of a great business model. 
 

They could of course always donate less money to charity, which wouldn’t be ideal, but could be a way of increasing the buffer.


There’s also the slim chance they could actually go through with the Bazaar idea, as a brand Glasto could sell tickets for another festival quite easily. 

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I suppose something has to give, if the demand won’t be there in the same way it was before Covid, the artists can’t really expect to be paid the same, they’re no longer worth as much. It doesn’t necessarily mean prices will drop for punters though, it will all depend on how many festivals end up folding equalising any demand. And if demand does drop for live events, will artists just switch to correspondingly smaller venues and just charge the same?

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Can't see there being lower ticket costs at all. Lowering the artist fees will be to increase their margins for next year and try to mitigate some of the losses for this year I'd imagine? I think festivals that sold big pre Covid will still sell well next year (Pimevara sell out for example) and those that will struggle to sell tickets would likely go out of business even faster if they lowered ticket costs to try and stoke demand.

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