What The Top 50 Global Music Festivals Reveal About Today's Live Music Industry
Festivals are often cash cows for the music industry, and 2016 is proving to be no different.
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which took place over two weekends in April 2016 in Indio, CA, generated $704 million in overall spending activity by consumers and businesses, and contributed an estimated $106 million to the local economy. The U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival, which attracted 135,000 attendees this year, has increased physical sales for Adele, Mercury Rev and other indie and celebrity performers by as much as 1,009% to 6,600%.
Coachella and Glastonbury reign atop the inaugural Festival 250, a Stubhub-sponsored report of the top global festivals of 2015 conceived by the B2B music publication Festival Insights, in collaboration with market research firm CGA Strategy. Released in September 2016, the rankings incorporate factors such as duration, ticket revenue, capacity and sponsorship estimates, and paint a compelling picture of both dominant and emerging markets in live music.
Below are the most significant trends among the top 50 festivals on the list—signifying how both geographies and genres are becoming more diverse on the world stage, creating more competition for incumbent players.
The U.K. and the U.S. dominate the top 50, while Africa, Asia and Latin America are nearly nowhere to be found—for now.
21 of the top 50 festivals in 2015 took place in either the U.K. or the U.S., with two in California and two in Florida alone. Europe overall has strong representation as well, with Germany, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands following the U.K. and U.S. as the top countries.
In contrast, Africa, Asia and Latin America account only for three entries among the top 50. Fuji Rock in Niigata, Japan ranks at No. 3 behind Glastonbury; Rio de Janeiro’s Rock in Rio clocks in at No. 19 in between two U.K. festivals; Magazine in Rabat, Morocco, ranks at No. 25 before Ultra.
Festivals are often cash cows for the music industry, and 2016 is proving to be no different.
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which took place over two weekends in April 2016 in Indio, CA, generated $704 million in overall spending activity by consumers and businesses, and contributed an estimated $106 million to the local economy. The U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival, which attracted 135,000 attendees this year, has increased physical sales for Adele, Mercury Rev and other indie and celebrity performers by as much as 1,009% to 6,600%.
Coachella and Glastonbury reign atop the inaugural Festival 250, a Stubhub-sponsored report of the top global festivals of 2015 conceived by the B2B music publication Festival Insights, in collaboration with market research firm CGA Strategy. Released in September 2016, the rankings incorporate factors such as duration, ticket revenue, capacity and sponsorship estimates, and paint a compelling picture of both dominant and emerging markets in live music.
Below are the most significant trends among the top 50 festivals on the list—signifying how both geographies and genres are becoming more diverse on the world stage, creating more competition for incumbent players.
The U.K. and the U.S. dominate the top 50, while Africa, Asia and Latin America are nearly nowhere to be found—for now.
21 of the top 50 festivals in 2015 took place in either the U.K. or the U.S., with two in California and two in Florida alone. Europe overall has strong representation as well, with Germany, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands following the U.K. and U.S. as the top countries.
In contrast, Africa, Asia and Latin America account only for three entries among the top 50. Fuji Rock in Niigata, Japan ranks at No. 3 behind Glastonbury; Rio de Janeiro’s Rock in Rio clocks in at No. 19 in between two U.K. festivals; Mawazine in Rabat, Morocco, ranks at No. 25 before Ultra.
This exclusion may be somewhat misleading, as renowned festival franchises are already expanding their empires into these continents. In Latin America, Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), Tomorrowland and Creamfields have been organizing offshoot festivals in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru. The weekend of November 12, 2016 alone saw the premiere of Electric Zoo: Countdown Shanghai and EDC India, and Ultra Worldwide wrapped up its Ultra Asia tour in September 2016.
Many of Africa’s most popular music festivals, such as Malawi’s Lake of Stars and Swaziland’s Bushfire, highlight local artists and traditions, making them less easily penetrable by American franchises. Even Mawazine, which featured stars from Iggy Azalea to Hardwell this year, dedicates the vast majority of its lineup to African talent.
One of the live industry’s biggest barriers to growth in Africa and Asia is domestic political conflict. Mawazine is organized by the personal secretary to Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, which has led critics to call the government’s financial priorities into question amidst national problems of poverty and unemployment. The Chinese government has blocked YouTube and SoundCloud, two key engines for increasing exposure for artists and listeners who would otherwise be siloed by their location.
Nonetheless, both Africa and Asia are surfacing as exciting markets for the music industry, driven by a surge in digital consumption. Although Asia accounts only for 14% of global digital music revenue, the continent represents 44% of all internet users, according to research by McKinsey & Company. The digital music industry in Southeast Asia in particular grew at more than 20 times the average global pace between 2011 and 2015. According to CISAC’s 2016 Global Collections Report, Africa saw a 13.6% rise in overall music royalty collections and a 33.2% rise in live/background music royalties last year. We can expect a more robust live music infrastructure to emerge in these music economies as more money and data get pumped in through streaming, giving otherwise localised artists access to larger audiences.
DOVER, DE – JUNE 18: Recording artist Anthony Gonzalez of M83 performs onstage at Firefly Music Festival on June 18, 2016 in Dover, Delaware. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Firefly)
Genre diversity doesn’t matter, and the lineups for U.S. festivals aren’t as unique as you may think.
The Festival 250 indicates no significant correlation between ranking and genre diversity, with plenty of rock-only or electronic-only festivals ranking high on the list alongside those with a wider musical spread.
Interestingly, the lowest-paid genres in the music industry overall perform particularly well on the festival circuit. As FORBES reported earlier this year, EDM and hip-hop do not bring in as much cash as rock, pop and country on average, due to their relatively nascent maturity as genres. Yet, 14 of the top 25 festivals in 2015 featured EDM and dance, while 11 of the top 25 featured hip-hop. The strong presence of these two genres on streaming services—hip-hop is the most-streamed genre in the world, and EDM’s fundamentally digital form thrives best on SoundCloud and other online communities—makes them easily marketable to international audiences, translating to prominent visibility on the world stage.
As a variety of artists become more popular on a global scale, it will become more difficult for the top festivals to distinguish themselves solely through their lineups. In fact, many lineups seem to be converging, with artists and groups “festival-hopping” across the world to serve different audiences with largely similar tastes.
To analyse the extent to which festival lineups overlap, I compared the top five U.S. festivals according to the Festival 250—Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo, Coachella, Firefly and Governors Ball—and mapped their 2016 lineups onto a Venn diagram:
DOVER, DE – JUNE 18: Recording artist Anthony Gonzalez of M83 performs onstage at Firefly Music Festival on June 18, 2016 in Dover, Delaware. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Firefly)
Genre diversity doesn’t matter, and the lineups for U.S. festivals aren’t as unique as you may think.
The Festival 250 indicates no significant correlation between ranking and genre diversity, with plenty of rock-only or electronic-only festivals ranking high on the list alongside those with a wider musical spread.
Interestingly, the lowest-paid genres in the music industry overall perform particularly well on the festival circuit. As FORBES reported earlier this year, EDM and hip-hop do not bring in as much cash as rock, pop and country on average, due to their relatively nascent maturity as genres. Yet, 14 of the top 25 festivals in 2015 featured EDM and dance, while 11 of the top 25 featured hip-hop. The strong presence of these two genres on streaming services—hip-hop is the most-streamed genre in the world, and EDM’s fundamentally digital form thrives best on SoundCloud and other online communities—makes them easily marketable to international audiences, translating to prominent visibility on the world stage.
As a variety of artists become more popular on a global scale, it will become more difficult for the top festivals to distinguish themselves solely through their lineups. In fact, many lineups seem to be converging, with artists and groups “festival-hopping” across the world to serve different audiences with largely similar tastes.
To analyze the extent to which festival lineups overlap, I compared the top five U.S. festivals according to the Festival 250—Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo, Coachella, Firefly and Governors Ball—and mapped their 2016 lineups onto a Venn diagram:
Lineup overlaps of the top U.S. music festivals in 2016. (Analysis and graphics by Cherie Hu)
Governors Ball had the highest proportion of overlap acts in 2016, with 51.5% of its acts performing at one or more of the other four festivals. In terms of price paid per artist, Governors Ball was also the most expensive among top U.S. festivals, with a multi-day general admission ticket costing $3.88 per artist, as FORBES reported in April 2016. In contrast, 21.7% of Austin City Limits’ lineup consisted of overlap acts, and a multi-day stub cost only $1.66 per artist, slashing Governors Ball’s price by more than half.
The overlap acts included both emerging and celebrity artists across a wide range of genres. Electropop band M83 was the only group to perform at all five festivals; rapper Vince Staples, folk-rock band Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats and synthpop outfit CHVRCHES played at four out of the five. In total, 22 artists performed at three out of the five festivals, and an additional 56 artists performed at two of the five (if you’re interested in diving more deeply into the lineups, here’s the raw data).
Moreover, similar artists tend to festival-hop together. For example, electronic artists AlunaGeorge, Gallant and Major Lazer all performed at Austin City Limits, Coachella and Firefly, while indie groups Oh Wonder, St. Lucia and Saint Motel all played at Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo and Firefly.
If these lineups are becoming less distinct, what unique value can festivals bring to the table? The Festival 250 hinted at a possible solution in its writeup about Coachella. By engaging early with digital distribution channels like YouTube, the festival got a leg up early on in “transcend[ing] the insularity of its physical limitations” and reaching wider audiences, wrote the report. In a similar vein, the inaugural Panorama Festival in New York City—which was not included on the Festival 250 list—showcased not only a stacked music lineup, but also a music-technology “playground” with interactive art installations and a 360º virtual reality theater.
As festivals internationalise further and embrace more musical diversity, they will have to adopt a similar mindset—thinking not just about the sounds fans will hear, but also about adjacent experiences around technology and lifestyle, either remotely or on the ground, that will make the entire experience more memorable
