At long last, the sun’s out. Soon it will be time to don your wellies (the sunshine never lasts) and head out to one of Britain’s great summer music festivals. Six million festival-goers pitched their tents last year, paying an average £100 for a ticket. That might seem a lot for the privilege of sleeping in a muddy field, but is it?
The Big Issue contacted some of the biggest events – think Wychwood Festival, Festival No. 6 and the Isle of Wight Festival – and crunched the numbers – using some admittedly “fuzzy maths” – to work out how your festival pound is spent (see chart).
If you’ve ever queued to use the festival loos, you could be forgiven for thinking that you’re not the only one to have spent a penny. So you may be surprised to learn that on average, festival organisers spend 7p on the facilities (except for Wychwood Festival, which just spends 2p, but revellers can nip next door to use Cheltenham racecourse’s new grandstand, complete with luxurious “water toilets”).
The stars of the show take by far the biggest cut at 38p. But that’s probably fair enough from a music festival.
The rising price of stardom
Still, that 38p might have to go up a fair bit if festivals are to afford the best – or even third-best – acts (hopefully not at the expense of the toilets.) As Lisa Verrico notes in The Sunday Times, performance fees started to rise dramatically in 2000 when Oasis were offered £1m to perform exclusively at Reading.
Since then, the fees have kept on rising. In 2011, the V festival paid rapper Eminem £2m to headline at its two sites. Rihanna – and her 100-strong entourage – had to make do with just half of that.
Festivals are also about showcasing new “talent” and there the rewards are clearly more modest. In 2003, glam rockers The Darkness were reportedly bunged £75 and a crate of beer to open Glastonbury, says Verrico. That was an act I remember not so well when I attended Glastonbury as a fresh-faced 20-year-old all those years ago. But hey, that’s rock ‘n’ roll.
Last year, Badly Drawn Boy had a dig on stage at the paltry £5,000 he had been paid to perform at Latitude. Some fans were sympathetic. Others said he was past it. Either way, he needs to get himself to California.
Golden oldies
If you want to know where the really big money is going, look to the oldies. “Heritage acts”, as the organisers of the world’s most profitable festival, California’s Coachella, will tell you are big business. So it stands to reason that these same organisers announced this week a “once in a lifetime” music event – Desert Trip.
That’s a cute slogan, says Dave Schilling in The Guardian. “Most of the acts are pushing 80, and I’m not referring to the speed of their cars… if they drive at all.” If you’ve long wanted to see any of the featured acts play live, you’d better stump up the cash for a ticket. The guys behind Coachella are betting that you will.
It won’t come cheap, mind. To see the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and The Who, you will have to find at least $399 for the three-evening event (the music starts at sundown). There are another six tiers of pricing above that, all the way to $1,599, which gets you into the (mosh?) pit.
If you fancy pitching your tent while you’re there, you’ll have to fork out another $99. But really, for an event such as this, you wouldn’t want to be seen dead in anything other than an RV. That’ll be another $950, please – plus fees.
$1,599? That’s nothing
But if you really want to be that annoying person bragging about having had “the best festival experience”, you need to head to Iceland. From 16 to 19 June, Radiohead, the Deftones and the former lead singer from Moloko are playing at the Secret Solstice festival in Reykjavik.
For $1m – yes, £1m – you get your own business jet (no RVs here), the use of a six-bedroom villa, two luxury cars, helicopters, bodyguards… you get the idea. You can check out the full list of what you get here. And not a chemical toilet in sight.