NPR Podcast Asks: Are Music Festivals Dead?

[ivn]

Comments

[andisprohi]

Not music festivals specifically, but I'm just wary of new events that obviously promise more than they'll be able to deliver. You see that a lot with food festivals now.

[anterrabre]

This. We had a vegan fest that turned out to be a hot mess with issues for both consumer and vendors.

[angebleu]

All those food festivals are so scammy. They always run out of food in less than an hour.

[noodlecookie]

The last 'food festival' I went to was more like a LinkedIn Live with stale blinis, it was dreadful.

[norrell]

The part about community/culture that feeds festival attendance was interesting. As the internet becomes more of a bot-stuffed, AI-summarized hellscape that hides forums or similar on page 500 of the search results, I could see how that affects discovery and excited chatter about new artists etc as a whole.

I know that reddit is like search engine no. 3 in this crazy online world, and the cost of that is it's created an overculture of how people talk about anything. Yeah there's a reddit for XYZ but the system is going to be the same everywhere you go. Surely that affects how people talk to each other when commenting, modding, user base is mostly alike.

Personality and individuality has been stripped from the internet. Ofc it'll affect the music scene.

[euraylie]

That last part! People assumed the internet was going to help everyone be truly individual in their self-expression, but it’s made everything more homogeneous than ever before.

[hardto_remember]

I’ve been favoring solo concerts over festivals because it became obvious that post-pandemic producers were so obsessed with milking every last cent out of audiences that security was becoming too compromised for big events. I only go to smaller festivals now and then but def don’t feel comfortable facing huge crowds.

[justrachna]

Tickets are stupidly expensive and no one can afford to go. At this point I hope everyone goes broke especially ticketmaster and livenation so things get reset but it’s a pipe dream

[marywebgirl]

I just sold an extra ticket to a concert through Ticketmaster and they said they wanted to deposit it into my bank account. I was like nah I don’t want to give you that. But they already had it! I have no idea when they got my bank account number.

[justrachna]

Okay that is TERRIFYING. That’s very worrying. I wonder if there is any agency you can report them to because that’s not okay. I would shit myself if that happened to me lol. I am the type of person that has one dedicated online credit card so I can control the line of information between a business and my financial information

[teaaet]

this

i'd go to so much more shit if the tickets weren't so insane

for example, i love outside lands have been several times. but the last few years i haven't because there aren't a ton of artists i want to see and the tickets are SO expensive. if they were cheaper i'd go for a day just to wander around and hear new bands.

[fffireburns]

I think there's just too many of them popping up now. People cant afford to go to a ton of festivals every year. Gotta pay for tickets, food, transportation/lodging if you're not from the area, time off work if its a 3 day fest. Its a lot.