Glastonbury, the BBC and the BRITs

Glastonbury Festival seems to have reached full cultural ubiquity. For months, we have read about and debated the lack of female headliners, the age of the headline performers, the amount the BBC is spending on filming the festival, which celebrities will be going, who will be Elton’s co-performers, the coverage becoming more intense as the date for the festival approached. It hasn’t stopped: while it’s two weekends behind us, Elton’s performance is still being talked about, the impact on streaming engagement of the performer’s albums is allegedly being felt* and speculation continues as to whether Taylor Swift will headline next year.

The scale and fervour of public discussion is equivalent to the consumption of content from the festival by British media consumers. Data released by BBC put the number of unique performance streams from the festival via the BBC’s digital properties, IPlayer and Sounds, at over 50MM, nearly 50% more than last year (more individual show streams than there are adults in the UK population). This eclipses any other view count I’ve ever seen for livestreams of concert performances, free or paid, anywhere else globally (though I suspect Eurovision may be bigger). How did a festival born out of the counter-cultural movement, a staging post on the circuit for New Age Travellers and at one time on the verge of extinction, become such an iconic fixture in British culture? Should we applaud or criticise the close partnership between Glastonbury and the BBC — and is the mainstreaming of the festival and its cultural power something we should celebrate or be concerned about?

Glastonbury is over fifty years old now, and has gone through three main phases — the “hippy” phase when it was a free festival on the circuit made famous by the New Age Traveller movement; the first paid festival phase, charging for entry and programming more mainstream acts as well as developing programming inspired by the explosion in acid house and rave culture; and the current phase marked by the involvement of Mean Fiddler (later Festival Republic), the best-known festival production outfit in the UK. I first attended in 2000 at the end of the second phase; the hippy ethos was still there, but there was a parallel infrastructure run by gangs who could provide a ladder over the fence for a fee and sold booze and drugs within the festival. The anarchic set-up worked for punters, but must have come at an economic cost to the festival, as gate and booze sales are their primary revenues, and if people are getting in for free, why should anyone buy a ticket? The involvement of professional festival producers marked a change from the DIY ethos of before; what it lost in spirit it gained in structure. When I last visited in 2019, it was an event of such scale and complexity, that it seemed obvious that the production team behind the event must be running the best-executed event anywhere in the world.

This attention to detail, that marks the current phase, has come at a cost most keenly felt in ticket-price inflation. Indeed, to read some critiques of the festival, by now Glastonbury is a fixture in the Season, sandwiched between Ascot and Henley — an event where the upper echelons of the class ladder congregate to party (which has also further changed its spirit). The critique has some validity; at over £300 for a standard ticket in 2023, when you factor in travel, on-site food and drink, etc, the cost to attend is equivalent to a week’s holiday abroad. Hospitality tickets this year were over £700 and a micro-industry of packages, from having your tent pitched for you to lavish off-site mini-resorts, have sprung up to cater for those able to pay. While helicopter flights to the site for the more famous artists are unsurprising, these are available for wealthy punters not wishing to drive and park. The argument against this perceived parasitic behaviour is that most people are economically excluded from events like Wimbledon, Henley Regatta and the Polo, so why is it okay for those who traditionally attend those events to colonise this music culture institution? While there are parts of the festival programmed to provide platforms for artists from a diverse set of communities, from black artists to DJ’s and drag performers from the LGBTQ+ community, my sense in-person and watching it on TV is the crowd is not notably diverse, which is surprising for an event that boasts 200,000 attendees (I have no hard data to support this contention, and this is not a phenomenon unique to Glastonbury).

Glastonbury may be criticised for not making the event itself particularly accessible; the festival might argue that its real power is in providing a platform for artists and elevating them through its broad cultural impact. In 2019 the festival gave Stormzy the first headline slot for a black British artist since Skunk Anansie; while homegrown Black Music was enjoying unprecedented engagement, such a notable slot in an institution in music culture had not yet happened, so the move carried huge symbolic weight. Stormzy’s performance was outstanding and marked an inflection point for the genre within Music culture, and cemented Stormzy’s place as an artist in the mainstream. This latter fact reinforced Glastonbury’s cachet as a music property that had the power to meaningfully impact music culture.

How did a festival with vibrancy and artistic credibility rooted in counter-culture become a door into mainstream success? It’s instructive to examine the development of the Glastonbury brand alongside the evolution of the BBC’s brand in music culture at the same time. If we think back to that first time I went to Glastonbury in the early 2000’s, the BBC was the primary gatekeeper to commercial success for recorded music. They enjoyed an audience across Radio 1 and 2 that would have inhabited nearly every British household. They had the biggest music TV show in Top of The Pops. There were very few other demand-generating channels apart from BBC radio for music discovery as commercial stations followed rather than led; and in TOTP, they had the ability to catapult records into mainstream public consciousness through peak-time TV performances. Since then, however, the BBC’s power to break artists has waned, mostly due to the mass adoption of music streaming — combined, streaming services command a bigger audience and have a more direct and measurable ability to power music discovery through their playlist ecosystems. Top of The Pops doesn’t exist any more, so the BBC doesn’t have a TV show that beams whatever’s popular in music every week into every British home.

Back in 2001, Glastonbury would be filmed for broadcast in limited slots and highlights packages on BBC2. There’d be little depth of coverage and the performances would have been from headline artists. The cultural and commercial impact from the coverage, in a world before social media, would have been to amplify word-of-mouth and journalistic sentiment. Moving forward in time, streaming may have diminished the impact of music radio, but it provides technology a media company of the BBC’s size can leverage. They can film and broadcast as much content as they have budget for; the range of options on iplayer and through things like red button is exponentially greater. Add coverage on digital stations like 6Music and the Sounds app, and Glastonbury is literally in anyone’s home, minus the dance music-oriented rave end which wouldn’t translate, and of course the weather. With this distribution, the fifty million individual stream figure is thus understandable.

It’s no wonder the partnership has continued for so long, as the symbiosis between both brands has helped each to grow and to fulfil their distinct as well as their combined objectives. As BBC radio’s hegemony has decreased, the festival has allowed the BBC to maintain power in British music culture and to wield influence in the industry (likely articulated as fulfilling its cultural mandate). The coverage delivers great value to the corporation’s main constituents: educated ABC 1’s who will at some point have attended the festival. Note the outgoing BBC chair’s comments about the regressive nature of the license model and how it benefits the middle-classes — keeping this constituency happy is vital as it has the know-how to agitate on the BBC’s behalf when under attack (as it agitated against it, to cancel the planned decommissioning of 6Music some years ago). The BBC gives Glastonbury unparalleled distribution of festival content, which helps drive cultural impact and brand awareness and sentiment. Glastonbury can continue to charge high ticket prices and to pay artists relatively modest fees as the BBC’s coverage makes it a commercial no-brainer to perform.

It’s great to have so much incredible musical content, from the UK’s benchmark musical event, filmed to such a high standard, accessible in British homes for free at the point of delivery. At the same time, it creates challenges for British music culture. The power to curate what we see is in the hands of few people: the festival team (through their exclusive power to curate) plus the top agents and artist managers in the country (who control the touring schedules of artists and can influence line-ups through leverage). It is also argued that the might of the BBC’s reach supporting a festival in this way limits opportunity for smaller and more diverse offers on the circuit — 200,000 tickets is equivalent to twenty small festivals, all of whom would struggle to attract or afford Glastonbury’s headliners while those artists have the chance to be beamed into every home in the UK at the Worthy Farm event. The endless coverage in the media about Glastonbury performing artists and the dominance of the narrative in music around the festival removes oxygen from other conversations, other events and other artists. The BBC also covers Reading and Leeds festivals to fulfil the younger end of its demographic mandate (where Glastonbury coverage hits 25+, Reading and Leeds hit the Radio 1 16–24 bucket) but the coverage is more akin to Glastonbury’s 25 years ago.

There are a few easy fixes that the festival and the BBC could do to broaden the socio-cultural impact of the partnership. While there is broad programming on site, and plenty of opportunity for developing and emerging artists as well as music from less mainstream genres, this is rarely given broadcast space. Elevating access to this content seems like a no-brainer (though the widespread shuttering of BBC’s Introducing vehicle for new music won’t make this easier). The festival could also justify the eye-watering cost of a VIP ticket if it was perceived to subsidise access through lower ticket costs. One way they could do this, for example, would be by offering day tickets, which currently (as I understand it) are only made available to locals and only on the Sunday. They could also offer a discount to the unwaged — the old UB40 discount of yore.

The consumption impact of Glastonbury was quantified earlier. In the last 2 years, we’ve had music performance across terrestrial and online “TV” that has been in the same league — notably, The Queen’s jubilee concert from Buckingham Palace, Eurovision, and the Coronation concert. These shows have all drawn the same huge shares of viewing and online consumption. Yet the official annual showcase for British talent mounted by the Bpi, the trade body for the recorded music industry, is the BRITs. Broadcast in February on ITV, another mainstream terrestrial channel, viewing figures for the show in 2023 peaked at just under 4 million, with1.2million streams achieved on ITVX. The individual audience share was 25.7%. Contrast that with Elton’s farewell performance to get a sense of scale: it scored nearly 50% of the available audience on Sunday night. Why doesn’t the BPi draw inspiration for these other events? The audience want more — the iconic staging-and-set of national landmarks or the Pyramid stage, or the high camp and drama of Eurovision. Perhaps it’s time to abandon the award-giving and the shots of suited men sat around tables at the 02 and mount a show that cuts between stages set up all over the country at notable landmarks and venues. Spinal Tap from Stonehenge, anyone?