Music Festivals: exploring the commercial potential of terrorism?
Glyndebourne in rural Sussex is home to the famous opera house. The picnic on the lawn followed by high quality opera is as familiar a part of the English Summer as Wimbledon, test cricket or indeed Glastonbury. A music festival is rather an apposite comparison, as in the grounds of Glyndebourne a jazz festival with a familiar format has become established over the last few years.
In previous years, as usual, parts of the jazz festival site became a campsite for those attending the full 2 days, and a carpark for those coming on a day ticket. There were colourful stalls whose beguiling products and offerings, like face painting, caught the eye of revellers in the fairground atmosphere. Appropriate as there was, actually, a fair. And of course there was a variety of food stalls from the banal to the exotically vegetarian. Serving the other end of the alimentary canal, putting more than a dozen urinals in a single portacabin meant men generally didn’t have to queue. There were also individual cubicles, but not enough to stop long lines of queuing women forming. A range of acts within and around the genre, from headline down to next-generation, performed on a number of stages, and were watched by picnicking fans on well-cut grass. And all to the backdrop of the very attractive South Downs scenery, permeated by the sweet sickly smell emanating from the kind of substances smoked at such events.
However, this year’s Love Supreme Jazz Festival was different. The picnicking was without the picnic baskets, as there was no food or drink allowed into the festival, and no access back should anyone wish to leave the site and have their picnic in the carpark. Drink was an interesting ban, as these days no one likes to be without their bottled water, but it was mentioned that there were taps inside the festival. A careful perusal of the website indicated that those with special dietary needs could bring their own food. Of course some of the more canny fans suddenly remembered their dietary intolerances, particularly of food and drink sold at festivals.
Within the festival site, mineral water could be purchased at £2.50 for a small bottle and within the captive market that existed, even the direst and most expensive food was queued for. There was even a touch of irony as one of stalls was called ‘Asian Street food’, selling small veggie wraps for £8 each and insulting genuine street food. To be fair, it’s quite possible that the food stalls were charged a disproportionately larger amount than in previous years, because of the captive purchasing environment. This would likely have been passed on to their customers, notwithstanding business would have been brisker.
Word on the well-cut grass was that the organisers didn’t want the expense of paying for extra security staff to search the food and drink hampers, required to keep queues moving. But once a ban on food and drink had been accepted, the temptation was for the organisers to further plumb the depths to see where the limit of the public’s tolerance lay. Perhaps banning a return to the festival once people had left for the carpark was an afterthought and a simple way to reduce staff requirements, and expenditure, throughout the day. Doubtless such bans would be justified under the burgeoning umbrella of countering the terrorist threat, even if there were commercial gain for the organisers.
The solution is to allow the hampers in, and any extra security cost added to the ticket price: This extra cost should be commercially neutral. However, the organisers, by seeming to make money out of the security and the inconveniencing of their customers, have probably lost their trust. So such security costs should be transparent and able to be publically vetted. It would also dispel the suspicion that there’s a musical hierarchy in the grounds of Glyndebourne, where opera lovers are treated much more respectfully than jazz, soul and funk lovers.
