Does the Early Bird Catch the Worm?

One thing’s for certain in the UK festival market of late – and that’s uncertainty. Ever since the market’s total revenue failed to grow for the first time this millennium between 2007 and 2008, saturation as more and more events are added to the calendar makes for a tougher climate in which to sell enough tickets to survive.

This isn’t only true of the smaller festivals. Larger festivals struggled in 2012, too. The **Sonisphere** festival held at Knebworth since 2009, cancelled only a month after announcing due to what has been often cited (though never confirmed) as poor ticket sales. Less severely, other major events, with some notable exceptions, sold much slower than they had previously (**Reading and Leeds**, for example, did not sell out of camping tickets until less than two weeks before gates opened).

So, what factors led to poor sales for many major festivals, despite even **Glastonbury** taking it’s year break? For one, the Olympics happened, but most festivals did not clash with the two-week Games, and increased tourism should, at least in theory, have negated the effect of some spending the entirety of their disposable income on a trip to London.

Compounding this issue of diverted spending is the sheer price of festivals in the UK nowadays – a weekend camping ticket to a major festival here will typically set you back over £200, which, in comparison to events in mainland Europe (often sporting very similar line-ups), is very steep.

But the hidden issue causing trouble for the festival market in this country is likely that which contributed largely to the aforementioned price hikes – that is, that competition between events to find the most popular acts available has led to a bit of an arms race. Competitors end up splashing large amounts of money on securing the largest acts available to their particular genre niche. This, in turn, has meant that even headline acts have a tendency to come over to play summer festivals with demand-dampening frequency. For example, **Metallica** have played a UK festival during 4 of the last 5 summers, with **Kings Of Leon** performing the same number.

The only realistic way of combatting this is to try and secure the biggest bands from whatever limited pool is available as early as possible, to stave off interest in competing events. This has a knock-on effect of forcing promoters into announcing earlier and earlier in an attempt to secure fans’ ticket purchases. For example, rather than waiting for a full line-up before announcing, this year, Reading and Leeds have announced in small chunks, beginning in November – a full 9 months before the festival, with **Download** releasing all of their headliners before the end of September (quashing Sonisphere’s already slim chance of coming back to compete against them).

So, then, is the UK festival scene in decline? It’s unlikely – the proportion of major events shelved this year was not higher than previously, if weather-related cancellations were taken into account. It’s just likely that the ways in which promoters try to attract potential customers to their events is changing, with early ticket on-sale dates crucial to ensuring that a festival can go ahead in a high-stakes climate.