Why are small festivals dying?

Our smaller festivals dying Out Glastonbury Park Life and Download a massive and yeah, they attract the biggest names, but smaller, more intimate festivals are having a tough time. This year 45 festivals have been cancelled or postponed in the UK and it's even thought that number could double by the end of 2024. While the big festivals are fantastic, you don't get quite that intimacy a lot of the time. These small festivals and small venues are where your headliners begin. You know, just walk out on a Glastonbury stage or on the O2. You know, you've got to cut your teeth in these smaller places. So what does it all come down to? Money like everything, prices are going up, booking artists, power to run a set and even get in the portaloos in and running is all costing more. But there's another big thing. Festivals are big business now and as the industry has made more money, bigger companies have got involved. From the data available, Sky News has found that Live Nation and its subsidiaries now run about 30% of festivals this year. So sometimes making it harder for those smaller festivals to book a half decent line up. I'm Freddie Fellows, this is The Secret Garden Party and I suppose it's all my fault. So Freddie, he founded The Secret Garden Party festival back in 2002 and people like Lily Allen have played there, The xx and Jungle. And now he says he's got a plan to help smaller festivals. We want to do is OfferUp this space for a collective of the smaller festivals to group together and do a festival with the support of our all our infrastructure, our back end support. I'm not standing here saying that the internationals are awful and evil or anything like that. They are there to make money and to, you know, reward their shareholders. They aren't about supporting grassroots and in this week club together. We're going to be picked off 1 by 1 by the majors. We put the claims to Live Nation and they said the UK festival market is defined by its competitive nature. There are hundreds of festivals in the UK, ranging in size, genre and audience.