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Great Britain is one of the main centres of modern pop culture. Hundreds of huge festivals take place here every year, attended by tens of thousands of people. Their popularity and profits are so great that their owners have registered trade marks on them to protect their rights as well. Examples of these are:
Glastonbury Festival – https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00002262035;
Isle of Wight Festival –https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00002450924;
V Festival – https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00903223153;
Creamfields – https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00002163518
Each of the above festivals is dependent on the number of visitors that attend them. Therefore, any world events can affect them.
The year 2020 has been one of the toughest years for enterprises in all areas of business. The Covid-19 pandemic, the subsequent quarantine and the strict Lockdown had a severe impact on the profits of almost all companies and entrepreneurs.
The singers and performers who have had to cancel their tours and refuse to participate in concerts as a result of these events have been hit hardest by the quarantine restrictions. In an interview with the Observer, artists said they had had to cancel shows or cut elements of their performances. Others have lost tens of thousands of pounds for each solo performance.
As a result of the overall price increase, the cost of tickets for each performance has risen by 15%, while the festivals themselves cost 30% more for the artists. Such price hikes, caused by the organizers’ attempts to recover from the pandemic, mean that every sixth festival is cancelled due to the inability of the singers to pull it off.
“Smaller acts are wondering if it’s worth the small fees to get there” – as Paul Smith, Maxïmo Park’s lead singer described the situation as of 2020. Thus, it was the emerging artists who took the brunt of the damage to their ability to continue performing, and who were forced to stop performing in order to avoid falling into deficit because they were unable to pay for their performances.
Another negative factor that applies to festivals in Britain is the large number of singers and artists who have simply given up on concerts due to price hikes in both visas for them and logistical considerations when calculating all the losses they will incur. “It would have cost us a lot of money to do festival dates, and our fees would have been minimal. So we didn’t.” – Rachel Unthank.
The last factor that makes the situation around the festivals bleak is their constant postponement. Thus, according to John Rostron, the AIF’s chief executive in a recent publication, more than a hundred have been postponed in three years. Constant postponements prevent artists from performing at festivals at a profit, leading to them canceling shows.
Several years of postponing festivals has in turn led to their current unpopularity. As a result, the teen generation did not get used to the festival atmosphere in these three years, and the current lack of popularity of the festivals among the younger generations is one of the reasons why the festivals have become so unpopular. If this trend continues, we may not see more emerging artists in the future who cannot afford festivals any longer.
