The broken music festival model

Before I start this rant. I love festivals. It’s going to sound like I’m really negative about them. Despite all these things, I continue to attend and continue to play, but I want you to take all these things into account so that there are less glum faces when people’s expectations have been shattered.

So, I made a post about how to get booked at festivals because I keep getting asked. It's over here.

I alluded to the music festival model being completely broken, so now I have to write this.

The aim of a music festival is pretty simple: stick some people on a field for three days, put on some bands, and everyone has fun.

The problem is, everyone needs to get paid, and margins are incredibly tight. As a result, the music festival world is filled with people getting underpaid and well-intentioned individuals whose parents either have money or land, or both, thinking a music festival is a good idea.

I'm going to keep my descriptions generic. It allows me to bitch about people without worrying about it, and I believe what I am saying is applicable across the UK and probably around the world.

The big boys

If we start with the good old honest "let’s make as much money as possible" festival, the model is simple. Put on a band with a guaranteed return, keep costs as low as possible while maintaining health and safety, and charge £8 a pint of generic lager. This is all fine and well. They've usually grown their model from something smaller and have the infrastructure and planning in place to pull it off. The event keeps a good wedge of the music industry in employment and is an important bringer of revenue to the music tourism economy. Only the most blinkered live musician could claim that their main source of income doesn’t boil down to encouraging people to spend money across bars.

Market forces define many things about these festivals. "Band with a guaranteed return" is increasingly a nostalgia act. Music tastes are now so fragmented that the best way to guarantee as many £8 pints are sold as possible is to put on someone who was big in the late 90’s. It's the perfect combination of attracting older people with wallets and discerning young music fans who elevate the bands from a previous generation to a pedestal.

In order to keep costs down and maintain a competitive ticket price with the other festivals with the same lineup, the festival has to take advantage of all the employment law available to them. Staff are on low wages and zero-hour contracts. This results in an ongoing battle with the festivals to hold their feet to the flames on various issues.

There is an agreed subterfuge that there is a "cool" and some gravitas involved in working the bar of a fancy schmancy festival. Tell your feet that after a 14-hour minimum wage shift in a field in the middle of nowhere.

The one advantage of having one of these festivals in your local area is that they have multiple stages. Sometimes down to little acoustic stages. There are myriad ways of getting up-and-coming bands involved.

The festival knows that these opportunities are highly coveted. As a result, the fee rarely covers your petrol money. It’s important for bands to only do it if they are going to maximize what they get out of it: social media, photos, video.

If there's nothing competing with you on another stage, there is a chance that the band can play to audiences bigger than they are used to. PRS knows this, so the additional payment can be quite attractive.

As a big bearded leftie, it might surprise you, but I don’t have much of a problem with these big festivals. Everyone knows what they are. The music industry is a pretty unlikely place to bring down capitalism. Many of them have achieved legendary status. As such, you get paid less so that you can tell people you were involved.

The big festivals have usually grown past the masquerade of deciding that there is a hippy purity to being in a field to make someone money from selling you beer. They are less likely to have a privately educated, incredibly white person trying to sell you an ancient eastern spiritual healing gong to boost your immune system.

As an aside that I couldn’t decide where to include…. I was once playing at a small festival in England. It seemed to coincide with an important date in the Morris dancing calendar. At one point while I was having a wander early in the day, a Morris dancing troupe(is this the term?) descended like a flash mob. They were all in blackface. I couldn't decide if that was the strangest part or everyone around me not having a problem with it was the strangest part. It’s times like these I’m glad I don’t take drugs.

The other advantage of the big corporate machine is that their sheer enormity makes it a bit of an event. Some of the smaller indy festivals can lose a few acitvities and landmarks and start to look like the Father Ted Gala day:

The problem with big festivals is that they have to grow. People have to learn from their mistakes when their mistakes aren’t too costly. When the big stuff goes wrong, it goes very wrong. They are, after all, setting up a medium-sized city for 3 days in the middle of nowhere.

As an example, a big promoter used to filing stadiums etc., puts on a summer one-day festival. It’s like a gig, but there are about 5 well-known support acts, and it starts mid-afternoon, so it’s more like a one-day big festival.

I don’t know the details, but corners had been cut. The band arrived (or maybe even just their tech team) and looked at the stage and infrastructure. They got back on the plane. It didn’t meet their requirements(and presumably their contract) for health and safety.

The wheels then roll into motion. The bar staff arrives to work for a minimum wage at an event their favorite band is playing at. They get told to go home again. Zero-hour contracts mean that they don’t get a penny.

Punters who had booked hotels and travel find out a few hours before that the gig is not going ahead. Ticket refunds do little to pay for hotels and travel bought from a seller's market.

Looking at the bigger picture, this debacle damages Scotland’s music economy. The music industry talks. Scotland doesn’t always attract the big worldwide acts if they are only doing 2 dates in the UK or 8 dates in Europe. We told a worldwide act that we cut corners and can’t compete with the big boys.

Now the anarchic-punk beat poet at the indie festival might not think that Beyonce choosing not to play their local stadium doesn’t affect them much, but it genuinely does bleed through and give people jobs in industries that are satellite to the music industry. You don't have to go and see Beyonce, but you should be annoyed when someone pisses the opportunity against a wall.

The volunteer run festival

I can't even believe that's a term. Swirly 70’s designs on the poster with peace symbols and full honesty about not paying their workers!!

There's this tradition which has sprung up of mainly staffing festivals - especially the small ones - with volunteers. It started with paying the staff a pittance and putting them on zero-hour contracts. Festival organizers realized they had a currency of cool which was enough to entice people to do a 14-hour bar shift within half a mile of their favourite band. With the advent of Instagram, the selfie, and the carefully curated reality, the festival organizers cottoned on that they didn't need to pay people at all. As festival purse strings get squeezed, we're now moving into a period where the volunteers pay a deposit. If you get a full refund, it could be minus an admin fee. A truly expensive selfie.

So why should I care that someone is paying to do a bar shift in return for an unrealistic selfie?

Well, as those purse strings get ever tighter, the roles being covered by volunteers are getting wider and wider. There is talk of some festivals using volunteers to build stages and perform tasks that raise a lot of questions about health and safety and liability insurance.

From an annoyance point of view, you end up with festivals full of a sea of people in high vis vests who know less than you do about what's happening.

I was at an island festival where the only means to get back to civilization was a promised shuttle bus that linked up with a ferry. No one knew where the buses left from or when. Eventually, we walked to a bus stop in the middle of nowhere. An annoyed man stationed at the bus stop in a high vis vest was seriously perturbed that people kept on asking him when the buses would come. He had no idea. This was clearly the fault of the punters rather than the festival infrastructure.

A further annoyance is that there is no way to tell what "I volunteered at X festival" actually means. The best of these people have used their initiative and prevented disasters. The most brass-necked will have you believe that they played a key role when they wore a colorful wig, took lots of drugs, and held a sign to the toilets.

The CVs of these people eventually land on desks for arts organisations dressed up as playing a key role in an important festival. They then get employed. They bring a "festival level" of organisation and infrastructure to your local arts organisations. Then someone suggests they run a festival... they hire volunteers, and the whole quagmire eats itself. ‘Our Rob or Ross’

The really clever festivals manage to get arts funding. If the volunteers pay tax, they are literally paying the festival for the privilege to be allowed to pay to work a shift. The whole thing gets dressed up as charitable work to support the arts. Not like those nasty big festivals that are just in it to sell you £8 pints.

The Permanent Postponement Festival

I don't know if COVID brought this festival model or if it's just when I started noticing it.

Festivals and gigs were all getting canceled. Someone cottoned onto the idea that if they postponed it, they didn’t need to give the money back. It's not a new trick. I saw The Stones in 1999 with a ticket I paid for in 1996 so that they could avoid paying tax.

As events started to re-emerge from the corona cocoon, you started to see lineups that seemed a bit unbelievable on a timeline that seemed a little unrealistic.

A fortnight before the festival, they would get "postponed" rather than canceled. In most cases, you could get a refund, but you could also be super helpful and roll your ticket over to the postponed event.

A new event would be promoted with different bands because the other ones couldn’t make it. It would get canceled, etc....

There is a caveat here. Postponing or cancelling an event is a mature and sometimes correct decision. The alternative is what causes life endangering disaster(see below)

So it's possible that it's just terrible management combined with a determination to get back to playing festivals, but the cynic in me saw some of the lineups and logistics and smelled a rat.

So I could put on a festival with The Stones headlining in a field with a capacity for 5000. Tickets 10 quid. Craft beer a pound a pint.

A fortnight before the gig, I’m afraid it looks like we just haven't had the ticket sales that we needed (because we'd need to sell several million), but hang onto your tickets, and we'll definitely do it next year.

The next year, another festival gets advertised with someone smaller than The Stones. It gets postponed.

Ad infinitum.

Now maybe this is just chronic bad management and terrible market knowledge, but even if there is no malice, it is hugely damaging.

Number one is the bands. Not The Stones. The up-and-coming ones that were doing it for £50 a skull. They've probably moved mountains to get the diary clear and their logistics in place to get to your festival in the middle of nowhere. They potentially turned down other festivals in favour of yours.

Now the sponsorship might come from Dave's used cars or some other local business, but you've essentially burned Dave's fingers for putting money into sponsoring the arts.

The local council probably got behind the festival (either with money or time) on the promise of bringing additional foot-fall to local business. The reality is that no one traveled any further than the festival website.

I've seen festivals like this receive arts funding. What happens? Do they give it back? Someone almost certainly more deserving than a canceled festival lost out.

These festivals have a habit of peppering their press releases with words like "independent" and "grassroots." This is happening so often that they are becoming bywords for badly managed.

Several years of funded festival development work without an actual event. These people appear on "expert panels" talking about how to successfully run festivals. The truth is that it's a pyramid scheme where the ticket money has already been spent. If the festival does finally take place, there is no money coming across the door, so the lineup will be a far stretch from the fantasy lineup that the initial punters paid for. As a teenager stands with his £3 ticket to watch Gary Glitter's bass player's solo project headline the main stage, an old man leans over and says…

"Do you know I bought my ticket for £200, and it was going to be Marc Bolan? 40 years I've been supporting the arts by rolling over my ticket."

Peace, Love & Limited Liability

As a veteran of music festivals and an avid observer of the Scottish (and wider) music business, I now come to the "posh boy running a music festival badly" as an ongoing trope.

Enter the posh boy whose father has land and/or money. They try to create their own Glastonbury. I guess because they think it will make them popular, or they’ll have fun or whatever. They have no discernible skills or experience, but where’s the harm in that?

Every year, a good handful of these festivals go under or get canceled. In the majority of cases, the festival is an LTD company, so they get to declare bankruptcy, and no one gets paid. It’s all tie-dye and white men with dreadlocks, but they always seem to have a good accountant. It’s just a bit of fun though.

"Their dad has money, and he’s a good laugh. No malice or anything."

So that’s bands, catering, tech staff, event staff, media… all the things associated with a festival either get a last-minute cancellation or worse still, turn up and do a shift and then not get paid their agreed fee.

These companies then don’t want to do it next year, but the festival is in profit(pre-accountant) so the owners push through and try and do things off their own backs, or get “volunteers” to give things a go. Do you really want structures being built by someone whose main experience is that they once built an Ikea bed?

"But seriously. He’s so much fun over a pint. He’s such a laugh. I think he actually has a title or something mad like that."

So this is the model that many indie festivals are generally based on. They are wonderfully good fun. They give lots of people great experiences, but it is done on the back of bands, catering, tech staff, event staff, and media getting shafted. In the extreme cases, the LTD company takes public arts funding to do all this. Taxpayers are paying them to shortchange a whole industry, and that funding isn’t going to someone more deserving.

It makes the whole Peace and Love and painting your bollocks blue in a field seem particularly shallow, and it’s getting harder and harder to hide your head in the sand and pretend that it’s not the case.

"I saw a great band. I had fun in the sun. It’s totally my favourite festival…."

What makes it worse is that our little music economy in Scotland can only sustain so many events. So there’s a "Shit or get off the pot" analogy. If someone is mismanaging a festival and arts funding, then someone else is not getting it. Try asking a local council for money for a music festival when there already is one.

If the whole infrastructure that makes these things work is getting stiffed on pay, then they won’t be there the next year when we genuinely do have a sustainable festival.

"But seriously…. He’s such a laugh…. You should hear about him talking about his year out in Asia."

It might surprise you, but I have no problem with musicians getting badly paid or not paid at all. I’d prefer if it didn’t happen obviously, but if it has to happen and it’s agreed beforehand, then it's all on the musician. I’ve driven the length of the country for musical adventures that paid less than I spent on service station sandwiches. We’ve all done it. You could argue that it is a necessity to make some things happen or an inevitability of the fact that it’s not that hard to strum a guitar. In every case, I knew my fee. I was realistic about it, and I had weighed up the advantages and disadvantages. It’s just not on when musicians are generally underpaid anyway to haggle after the fact or not pay the acts.

Cue the sycophants.

There is a small minority who believe everything the festival says about how sorry they are that their accountant has protected some working-class musicians from having access to the sale of their great-grandfather's artwork collection.

“C’mon! they have a peace symbol on their poster! “

They had a good festival experience once and are able to ignore all the stories and complaints. It’s just people being negative… or who just don’t understand the true essence of tie-dye or white men with dreadlocks or painting your bollocks blue or something.

This took a truly bizarre turn recently in Scotland. The critical mass of complaints and stories about one festival caused several trade unions to get involved and issue statements advising their members to steer clear of the festival.

A fair component of the peace, love, and tie-dye brigade are now anti-trade union. People who describe themselves as radical punk poets? Anti-worker and anti-trade union. Provided they get to do their spoken word set at a festival.

"If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair and fuck the workers."

Sing it over a 12-string guitar. It will sound magic.

Payment

So one of the most important things here is that young bands know that festival organizers run fast and loose with your payment.

You typically get told that you are getting paid about a quarter of your usual rate, but...

"....there will be plenty of rider, and the band will be given vouchers for food and somewhere to sell your merch. Let us know names for the guest list. We’re sure it’s going to be a great weekend…"

This has the makings of a contract. It sometimes even alludes to wishing they could pay you more, but that they are still trying to get the festival off the ground, and you’re doing them a massive favour. Yada yada.

So you discuss it as a band and decide to go for the weekend. You’re all taking your significant others because it’s a bit of a trek, so to just go and play your set doesn’t make sense.

The guest list

The day before you leave, the festival tells you there is a charitable donation for each guest list ticket. You can’t argue with this because, well, it’s charity. Many of the more obscure festivals in Scotland are charities that bring beer guzzlers to an otherwise sleepy area to help local communities. So the charitable donation is to the festival itself. Even if it’s not, it’s their charitable donation to get clout for future funding, but you’ve paid for it - despite the guest list being one of the benefits that’s meant to outweigh the low fee and difficult logistics for your gig.

I could write a whole blog on guest lists. Some people live their life schmoozing from one cool gig to another. People who strive to break even on gigs have to see this as an acceptable loss to make their gigs cool. Now with Instagram and wannabe influencers, there’s an expectation that only plebs pay the admission fee. I’ve even seen people ask for a discount in restaurants at the end of their meal in return for how many followers they have.

That said, I knock my pan in. I do a lot of favours and often work for less than minimum wage. I try not to take the piss with asking for guest list, and I try to keep my powder dry and only ask when I really want to trade in the favour, so it can be quite annoying when a freebie turns into less of a freebie at the last minute.

I went to a big festival in England once. I got huckled for £50 at the door. I don’t care what anyone says, a surprise £50 charitable donation is rarely met with a smile. I’ve never had to donate in advance. Always a last-minute decision, which makes me suspect it’s a bit scammy.

Anyway, at a certain point, I think it is polite to offer the band guest list (without surprise donations) as it gives you more options for managing your weekend away to the middle of nowhere when the fee isn’t very high. If needs must, it makes much more sense to have a half-price guest list ticket from the onset. This way, it can play a component in the band’s planning, and makes you feel like you are less of a freeloader when your complimentary weekend camping ticket gets turned into a day ticket(yip. It’s happened!) and you’ve got to kick up fuss.

Rider

The great mythical “free drink” that is given to the band backstage.

The higher up the tree you go, the better this bit generally gets, but also the less likely you are to have done 8 hours in the back of a van and a 3-mile load-in across a muddy field past 4 guys in hi-vis who had no idea where anything was, so you have less need for a cold can.

The whole idea, especially at a festival, is that the band is there to set up and play music and isn’t running about trying to make sure they have sustenance. Chances are the band is arriving before soundcheck and leaving after their gig. Easily 6 hours of hanging about. There are no shops in fields. There are rarely service stations near festival sites. The band has drunk their van drinks and finished their Haribo.

The “contract” always says:

“We’ll make sure there is plenty of beer and stuff for the band.”

The two words that require legal definition here are “plenty” and “stuff.”

It’s really simple. Loads and loads of generic cheap beer, and loads and loads of crisps. If you want to make people really happy, go and get a bumper tray of sausage rolls or something else calorific and stodgy from a cash and carry and add a kettle with some tea and coffee. As a common designated driver, some soft drinks and chocolate will make me less grumpy. No one can argue. Done.

It rarely happens.

Instead, it turns out “plenty” is one or two drinks tokens, and “stuff” is a packet of Haribo and a sharer bag of crisps. You kind of hum and haw as a band and try not to kick up a fuss. No one really wants to admit that they had hoped that the green room would keep them in drink for the festival.

Despite the festival having access to drink at cost price or even that a drinks company is their sponsor, they can be surprisingly stingy with it. Your negotiations take place with a volunteer in a hi-vis vest who thought being backstage would be pretty cool.

“Sorry. There was an 8-piece ceilidh band in last night, and they drank a whole crate of Becks. So we’re just not giving out beer now.”

Wow!!! They drank 3 bottles each??? In a 12-hour period??? What if they want to drive next week?

Add to this that the bands were getting their bags searched on the way in, and the only bars are selling warm cans of generic beer for £6 a pop.

I believe these festivals run on a business model of “we just have to ensure that the bands drink more than we pay them.”

I’m aware that that’s a big rant from a big man who you can probably guess can put away a fair amount of beer in the right mood. I’m not looking for freebies, but people should think before they put it in a contract. Far better to be honest. If I decide not to drive to my gig, which is rare these days, I don’t want to pay festival beer prices.

Even worse is to deny people food.

“Is there food for the band? The rider said we’d be fed and watered.”

“Yeah. They’ve done food tokens in the past. I’ve not seen any this year, though.”

Thank you for your Wikipedia entry on the history of the festival.

So you can get paid £50 quid for playing a festival that’s several hours of petrol away. You then spend £20 on a charitable donation for your significant other; You then have to buy 4 warm cans of Tennant’s for £24 and a cold burger with 8 chips for £15.

This starts you on the back foot. Everything else better be perfect. All because someone looked at a spreadsheet and thought the band were the people to squeeze.

On a side note, there can also be too much rider.

I worked a festival in a variety of roles that was trying to grow and get off the ground. They were trying to butter up the journos and band managers and such, and the backstage catering vans at the main stage ran on a voucher system. Vouchers were so readily available that the “punter vendors” were all complaining that they weren’t doing any business.

I really liked the festival (funny that), but it folded after a couple of years. This was despite the press all writing some very complimentary reviews that bore little resemblance to the truth. It’s a dirty business.

Conclusion

So, I wish this wasn’t the case. This messed up environment where you either take your life in your hands on a volunteer-built stage to fill the coffers of the 13th Earl of Wobblebottom’s son, or you give in to the corporate machine.

I’m afraid if a festival treated everyone fairly, then it would be about £800 quid a ticket.

One of the biggest issues is that the bands don’t complain.

“Breaches of contract that happen at WobbleBottomStock stay at WobbleBottomStock”

I include myself in that. Our set got cut short/cancelled because of your bad infrastructure decisions and planning. We tried to get paid our agreed fee and find some water after 5 hours, and we were treated as an annoyance. The travel information was wrong on the festival website, and we queued in traffic for 5 hours… But yeah… let’s keep our mouths shut in case someone who CAN manage a festival is put off booking us….

I guess the festival organizers know this… and that’s the problem.

I’d truly like this not to be seen as a guideline for making money off the back of a festival, but I realise it has become that. If you have access to pin money and/or land, you can set up a speculative festival. Put together a fantasy lineup. Don’t worry about costs. You can even get arts funding and find volunteers to help you. If it doesn't work, you can either postpone it the week before or go ahead with it and declare bankruptcy before anyone gets paid. Do it again next year under a different name.

I think we need some sort of government license to run a festival; it would drive up costs, which would mean we couldn't attract the best international talent, but if we used it to build a festival economy with trusted players, then the music industry would know who to get behind and ten years down the line, you could have something truly competitive. We already have the locations in Scotland - if not always the weather.