The complaint that Europe’s music festival market has surpassed saturation point may be true, but feedback from our 2017 survey of the continent’s event organisers suggests that the fierce competition is not harming the vast majority of festivals.
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total of 120 festivals took part in the 2017 European Festival Report and most of those events reported successful business for the year, despite the numerous challenges that promoters face when it comes to booking talent, securing licences, enhancing site security, and planning for inclement weather. Costs across the board may be rising, but the public appetite for music festivals still appears to be on the increase too, so the takeaways from this year’s report are thankfully more positive than negative. For the purposes of our quantitative reporting (ie the number crunching), we called upon the services of Live Data Agency’s Claire Buckle and Chris Carey, whose analytic skills and economist backgrounds have helped make sense of the data that so many of you trusted us with. Thanks go to both Live Data Agency (LDA) and everyone who took the time to fill in our survey forms. One caveat is that, for reasons of accuracy, we only collated the numbers from festivals whose daily capacity was above the 10,000 mark. The data submitted by smaller events has nevertheless been invaluable, notably through the commentaries that organisers shared regarding results and strategic planning, but in our efforts to deliver you meaningful information that you can use to help your business, when it comes to data such as pricing, VIP uptake, attendance, and staffing, we have discounted the quantitative information for those events with daily audiences of less than 10,000 people. As with all European festival seasons, 2017 of course claimed a number of casualties. In the UK alone, the final day at Y Not Festival in Derbyshire fell victim to a muddy fate, Flashback in Nottingham was canned because of poor ticket sales, and Hope & Glory in Liverpool folded mid-event amid rows concerning overcrowding and artist cancellations. But generally, Europe’s festival organisers had a relatively problem-free summer compared to previous years when the weather, in particular, played havoc across the continent.
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And that sunny overview is underlined by the confidence being shown by promoters such as the people behind EXIT, which is expanding to five countries in 2018 with the addition of Festival84 in Bosnia and Herzegovina next year, joining Sea Dance in Montenegro, Sea Star in Croatia, Revolution in Romania, and the classic EXIT Festival in Serbia. Indeed, cashing in on the confidence infused in fans through their enjoyable 2017 festival experiences, the number of early announcements regarding line-ups and headliners for summer 2018 has been relentless in recent weeks, while early-bird ticket offers for 2018 have been running, since the day after some 2017 events ended – and were even on sale at a number of festivals during the 2017 season. But let’s get down to the nitty-gritty: the results of this year’s survey…
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TICKETING & PRICING
et’s start with the things that most directly affect the audience (other than the line-up): ticket prices. Discounting the handful of free events, the average price for a weekend or full event pass at our surveyed festivals in 2017 was €148.36 – a very marginal (1%) increase on the €146.22 that those same events charged in 2016. Keeping that average price pegged are a number of factors: while 49% of our survey respondents raised their ticket prices in 2017, 36% maintained pricing at last year’s levels. With artist fees, production cost and security, in particular, costing more year-on-year, increasing ticket prices hardly come as a surprise. However, a significant 11% of festivals around Europe decided to decrease their ticket prices in 2017. Some
IQ Magazine January 2018