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