I’ve never been to a music festival...
...until today
Surprising I know, because in the past 20 years...
...they’ve become increasingly popular
Let’s take California’s Coachella
It’s been running since 1999 when it had 25,000 attendees
In 2017 there were almost 250,000 of them
And as festivals have grown...
...so have ticket prices
In 1979 a ticket for Glastonbury, the UK’s biggest festival, cost £5
In 2019 it was £248
To put things in perspective, if ticket prices rose with inflation...
...it would be five times more expensive today
In reality they’re 50 times more
So why are festivals so expensive?
Running a festival takes a huge amount of work
This is Jennie Jordan, she’s a festival expert
We never imagined the level of detail you need to go into
Lak Mitchell is a festival producer
He runs Boomtown...
...one of the biggest independent music festivals in the UK
It’s like setting up a small town
We’ve got hundreds of lines of budgets
You’ve got to make sure that you’ve got water...
...to make sure you’ve got Wi-Fi...
...internal traffic management, external traffic management...
...toilets...
...four different security companies...
...food...
...stewarding...
...drink...
...artist internal transport
The list is just bonkers
At Boomtown it also takes 12,000 crew...
...1,596 tonnes of scaffolding...
...3m litres of water and 2,000 bins...
...and all that costs
But then there’s one more thing that makes festivals much more expensive...
...the music
And actually it all comes down to this
It’s much more difficult now to make money selling recorded music
The rise of streaming has basically flipped...
...the economics of the music industry on its head
This is Tom Standage
He’s the head of all things digital at The Economist
And...
...a drummer in his spare time
It used to be that you made your money...
...from selling records, selling CDs, selling LPs...
...and you promoted them by going on tour
...and now you make your money by going on tour...
...and releasing an album is just really an excuse for another tour
And as the importance of touring has increased...
...so have artists’ fees
At Woodstock in 1969...
...Jimi Hendrix got today’s equivalent of $125,000
In 2019 at Coachella...
...Ariana Grande was paid $8m
That’s 64 times more
People out there really think that we’re making millions...
...but we barely broke even last year...
...even though the festival completely sold out...
...because it’s so expensive to put on
Artists are really, really tricky...
...because they will get offers from the big corporate festivals...
...that are like five times what we can afford
Here’s the deal
Over the past decade two companies Live Nation and AEG Live...
...have become a dominant force in the festival market
They’ve been pushing prices up...
...and buying smaller festivals out
Now they own close to a third of the British market alone
Live Nation’s net worth in 2019...
...was estimated at $15.6bn
And they’re scaling their business models...
...turning the likes of the Lollapalooza festival into a franchise...
...and exporting it to countries across the globe
Companies control the risk by running a number of different festivals
That allows you to have mitigating factors...
...if the weather’s awful one weekend...
...you’ve got another festival with income potentially...
...a couple of weeks later
It allows them to get some economies of scale...
...and it allows them to get the top artists’ tours...
...so that they can offer them more than one date over the summer period...
...and that’s very effective
And this means that the most popular acts...
...headline many of the big festivals
While these economies of scale may be cost effective for the big companies...
...the risk is that festivals feel more samey
And perhaps that’s one of the reasons why overall festival attendance...
...has declined since 2016
In Europe 18% of surveyed festivals reported a downturn in ticket sales
As the market gets more challenging...
...some independent festivals have turned economic necessity...
...into an opportunity
When we launched Boomtown...
...we had no chance of competing on big acts as well...
...so we had to kind of create this model and this experience...
...that was unique and had its own sort of identity...
...that set itself out away from other festivals
This is where it gets interesting
A ten-year, British-audience survey
...headline acts are a deciding factor for only 8% of festival-goers
But 53% said the overall experience...
...is the reason they bought their ticket
We asked these festival-goers why they’re here
A line-up will drag me in...
...but when I’m here, sometimes I don’t even see any music
I’ll be honest I don’t know any of the friggen music
It’s nothing to do with the music...
...it’s all atmosphere
And that’s part of a much bigger picture...
In the past 20 years the Western world...
...has shifted from buying things...
...to buying these kinds of things
In other words, experiences
My name is Joe Pine...
...and I’m going to tell you all about the experience economy
Joe has written a book called...
...well, “The Experience Economy”
Well what’s happened is we’ve gone from...
...an agrarian economy based off commodities...
...through an industrial economy based off goods, through a service economy
And today we’re in an experience economy
What experiences really do is that they engage everyone inside of them
It’s this engagement that the likes of Boomtown are banking on...
...to pull in the punters
Do I know you friends?
In 2019 Boomtown hired 2,000 actors...
...to draw festival-goers into a variety of immersive experiences...
...spread across 110 venues throughout the festival
I have a question I would like to ask...
...can you tell me...
...who really was the man behind the mask?
And it’s all designed to create this unique communal experience
Living in the digital age that we are now...
...there’s more need than ever for people to connect...
...and that’s what festivals do the best
And the digital age also means we can document these experiences
And of course show them off online
We take selfies not because...
...we think we’re going to get the perfect picture...
...but because we were there and it proves that we were there
These are similar to...
...that souvenir that you picked up on your seaside holiday...
...that means absolutely nothing to anybody else...
...but is so important to you
That is if you like the kind of evolution of what happened before
If you went round to someone’s house...
...you could see what records they had, what CDs they had...
...and that was a kind of social media
Really posting stuff on Instagram is just the kind of updated version of that
And in the spirit of keeping up to date...
...pretty much every music festival is now selling the experience
Gather round...
...the future
So what else will convince festival-goers...
...that their tickets offer value for money?
What’s the future of this incredible city?
In other words...
...what’s more experiential than experience?
There is an experience that changes us in some way...
...and that we call a transformation...
...and a transformation is the fifth and final economic offering...
...this progression of economic value
We’re using experiences as the raw material to guide people to change...
...to help them achieve their aspirations
So expect to hear that a ticket to a festival in the future...
...will be an investment in a truly transformative experience...
...one that will offer an opportunity to help you discover your better self...
...and one that might even be worth it