For the first time since 2002 Glastonbury tickets have failed to sell out. Demand is usually so huge that fans have to register months beforehand for a number that will make the frenzied buying process easier.
Typically all the tickets have been snapped up within the first 3 hours of their going on sale, but this year, 24 hours after being released, 100, 000 of 137,000 were still available. You would be forgiven for thinking that this news was in line with the Pope declaring he wasn’t Catholic, what with the amount of talk it has generated – everybody has an opinion on Glastonbury’s “decline”.
The two main theories circulating among the press are:
1) The weather
2) Jay-Z
Michael Eavis told BBC Radio 1’s Newsbeat: “I think three years of mud may have taken their toll.” He has a point. The idea of spending three days in the rain, with nowhere warm to retreat to at the end of the day is not appealing whether you get to see your favourite band or not. Add to that portable toilets and festival-goers who apparently have no idea how to use them, and Jay-Z doesn’t even get a look in.
A pair of happy campers
With festivals springing up all over the world that are cheaper, in fabulously exotic locations and have equally as excellent acts, Glastonbury – legendary or not – is feeling the repercussions.
To some, however, this is irrelevant. There is one reason, and one reason only, why Glastonbury is not as popular this year, and this reason is married to Beyoncé Knowles.
Most press picked up on Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher’s comments to BBC News, to whom he lamented: “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. If you start to break it then people aren’t going to go. I’m sorry, but Jay-Z? No chance.” The media has held Noel up as some sort of spokesman for the British music fan, as if all of us are thinking the same thing.
Personally, I think all reports of Jay-Z’s headlining appearance should have been delivered in the same kind of manner as Pitchfork does here. The website was upbeat about the news, holding back any opinion that it was a strange or wrong choice, or that it was bound to cause a backlash.
Maybe it’s because the website’s American (although, if this American blogger’s anything to go by, nationality doesn’t come into it – she certainly has her finger of blame pointed in the hip-hop stars direction) and does not hold as dear what is to Britain a national treasure, but it merely told its readers a megastar was going to play top of the bill at a top festival – a big musician booked for a big music event.
Jay-Z responds to the critics
Sometime NME writer Sam Richards, in a blog for The Guardian, states: “It would be very sad if, as many news stories have implied, Jay-Z‘s installation as the Pyramid Stage’s Saturday Night headliner has turned people off The episode does today’s Glasto-goer little credit. [His] booking is in keeping with the endearingly eccentric music policy of the festival.” Hear, hear. The main thrust of his comment focuses on his personal reasons for not going – mainly the crowd.
And there you have it. The rest of the press has failed to point out some obvious errors; sales are not the fault of the weather, or Jay-Z. Glastonbury’s organisers are wholly responsible. Everyone seems to be forgetting the repercussions following last year’s event, when no sooner had the last drunken reveller been coaxed from the Stone Circle than the organisers were bemoaning the people who attended and setting out plans to get less of their sort next year.
Michael Eavis said at the time: “People say we’re getting middle class, which is stretching it a bit far, but we’re attracting a lot more people in their 30s and 40s and need to get the Radio 1 and NME crowd back in. These kids add so much to the flavour of it and should have a lot of fun. The demographic is changing and it’s slightly worrying.”
This is fair enough and a younger audience should be there, but the decision to alienate their core audience (and the one’s most likely to afford the £165 ticket) has come back and bitten them squarely on the backside.
Making more tickets available though phonelines, rather than the internet is fine, (middle-aged people have telephones), even hiring a hip-hop artist to headline is not necessarily a bad thing (the middle-aged people likely to attend Glastonbury are open to all kinds of music, whatever genre), but openly voicing their hopes for a different audience next year? Now that hurts.
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