The Indian music festival season is almost upon us, and with the recent announcement of Sunburn Festival bringing star rapper Wiz Khalifa to India in September, the season is looking quite promising. As the festivals start announcing their lineups and ticket prices, we can’t help but wonder, Why exactly are the music festival tickets so expensive? Well, The Economist dug deeper and they might have the answer to your burning question.
In a vox-style informative video uploaded on YouTube, The Economist covered various aspects of putting together a music festival to find out the reasons behind high ticket costs. The obvious expenses were water, food, security to accommodate the crowds and the production costs. But the biggest and perhaps the most important aspect of a music festival – the artists have significantly increased their fees to make up for downslide in music revenues due to digital streaming revolution. The artists rely more on live shows and festivals to make money now, which resulted in someone like Calvin Harris charging up to 550 thousand US dollars per gig!
Some festival organizers were also interviewed, one of whom painfully stated that despite selling out all the tickets they barely managed to break even on the costs. In the age of social media, in order to stand out from the competition, the festival organizers are stressing on giving unique experiences to attendees through their on-site production; which in turn leads to higher production costs. Infact, an independent study from 2008-2018 revealed that only 8% attendees buy tickets for the headline acts while 53% attend a festival for the experience of it.
While this may not entirely hold true for the Indian market, it should give festival organizers here an indication that they need to give ample attention to giving the better overall experience of attendees for long term growth rather than just putting together a lineup consisting top acts.
Watch the video here to know more:
Source: The Economist
Follow Me