OPINION:THE SPECULATION about whether Ireland's biggest music festival – the annual Oxegen event in Punchestown, Co Kildare – will be reduced in size, relocated or just plain scrapped next year has cast doubt over the future of the weekend festival event.
Whatever about Oxegen – and promoter MCD says it will be announcing plans for next year’s event sometime this week – we do know that the daddy of them all, Glastonbury, will not be taking place in 2012.
Prosaically enough, a shortage of Portaloos because of the London Olympics and a cut in UK police overtime means there will not be a chord struck in anger in Somerset next year.
Glastonbury chief Michael Eavis says that while the famous festival will return in 2013, the time has been called on it lasting all weekend, mainly due to the expense incurred by customers but also because “there is a feeling that people have seen it all before”.
In Ireland, the Lisdoonvarna festivals of the 1980s and the Féile festivals of the 1990s showed that there was an appetite here for burgers, beers and beats all weekend, and until the recession began to bite, both Oxegen and its older cousin Electric Picnic were in rude good health.
Oxegen, which has been running since 2004, is a treasured rite of passage for the 18- to 25-year-old demographic. But last year a four-day camping ticket cost €244.50, and that spending capacity simply isn’t there among many young festival goers any more.
However, the live-music market is still buoyant. Tickets for The Stone Roses’ Dublin show next July went on sale yesterday. When the reformed band, who only released two albums, announced three Manchester shows for next June, they sold all 225,000 tickets in less than 60 minutes.
At £55 (€66) a ticket, that was £12 million taken in less than an hour. After VAT, overheads and the promoter’s fee are taken out, that still leaves the band with about £5 million for their three nights of work.
Granted, the Roses are an iconic band, and for a certain generation would have a Beatles/Stones type of appeal, but those figures show that the money is there and will be spent if the product is good.
Crucially, though, these figures are for a one-day event with no overnight camping costs to be met.
There is, as yet, no indication of how The Stone Roses’ Dublin show is selling, but putting it on sale during Christmas week will probably rule out an instant sell-out. Plus, more and more these days, people aren’t buying tickets for any music event until a few days before the show, or even on the day itself.
Tellingly, however, Electric Picnic (aimed at the older brothers and sisters and, indeed, parents of the Oxegen set) has sold its early-bird tickets for next year’s event, which went on sale last month. The older you are, the more forward planning is needed, so Electric Picnic customers are already booking their slot.
The live show still has a potent pull. Over the past decade or so our lives have become more and more mediated through social-networking sites and the various technological bells and whistles now available to us.
In a profoundly fractured social world where you can have thousands of “friends” and “followers”, the primordial impulse for the tribal gathering still reigns supreme, regardless of whether it is for The Stone Roses, Tinie Tempah or Leonard Cohen.
The message is that we will go to the one-day event – where we can get in and out for about €100 – but many people, particularly the 18- to 25-year-olds who went to Oxegen, just don’t have the €500 minimum spend for the weekend event any more.