IT MAY not be happening until next June and no-one has a clue yet who will be playing, but all tickets for next year’s Glastonbury festival sold out in a few hours on Sunday.
That’s 137,500 tickets gone just like that, one hell of an achievement at a time when the industry dialogue is about live gigs struggling to sell a few aul’ tickets (Script tours and Michael Bublé shows being exceptions).
Glastonbury had plenty of company a few years ago. Lots of festivals sold out their entire allocation of tickets in a few hours. Now, most promoters have to work and spend money – which in the good times went straight into their piggy-banks – to shift tickets: on advertising, decent line-ups, and flogging the shows on social networking sites.
Glastonbury by contrast, pulls in lashings of pre-game publicity and post-event coverage. The Glastonbury kudos is something which very few others (maybe Coachella?) can emulate on the same scale.
Next year will also be the fifth Glastonbury in a row without a break.
Festival founder Michael Eavis used to insist on a gap year every five years – to let the land recover and to give locals a break. There were no festivals in 2001 or 2006, for example. Next year they will plough ahead, and take a break in 2012 (London Olympics year) instead.
Selling a shed load of tickets in one go at a time like this is to be applauded.
Many festivals have sought to ape Glastonbury’s selling points, but none has succeeded in the same way.
This is an edited version of a post on Jim Carroll’s blog. Read the full post online at: irishtimes.com/ blogs/ontherecord
