The Unstoppable Rise of Festival Culture

With new festivals being announced both here and abroad almost every week, you can’t help but think about the implications this has for the future of dance music.

This year has seen the rise of dance music festivals on an unprecedented scale. Global Gathering and Creamfields are two of the better-known events in the UK but this year you could have got yourselves tickets to Lovebox, Farr, Beat Herder or Eastern Electrics to name just a few. This is just the UK, but as would be expected, the US has had a record number of festivals which are of course much bigger than ours over here. The ‘Electric Daisy Carnival’ and ‘Ultra Music’ franchises have spread across the states and even further around the world. This year’s EDC Las Vegas is estimated to have had an economic impact of $322 million with a record number of 400000 people attending.

On one hand it is a brilliant to see DJs and Artists perform on these big stages - a special experience unlike many others. Also the benefit these festivals bring to local and national economies has been proved to be huge. Evidently, the growth in number and size looks like it is not going to slow any time soon so our opportunities to see the acts we love are ever increasing.

However, not is all as rosey as it seems. Techno aficionado Seth Troxler gave an interview earlier this year where he blasted festival culture for being a shameful interpretation of what dance music is really about, as he codemned overpriced events of excess, decadence and terrible music. What he says does unfortunately seem to ring true. It is difficult to avoid the reality that mainstream dance music is all about money, and festival culture appears to be going that way with the rise in size of venue sees a relative growth in the size of the ticket price.

Politics and economics aside, tragic news struck that a 26-year-old man died after being attacked at Parklife festival last month, a devastating event that clouded the euphoria of the festival season.

Whether for good or for bad these events are relatively under-policed, and tensions tend to run quite high. Booze, sun and drugs can be a dangerous mix and having attended last year’s Parklife festival I can vouch that fights are sadly not an uncommon sight. It is wrong that festival goers should feel that they are not safe in an already turbulent environment, and the death at Parklifethis year is a sad affirmation of this danger.

The issue stands that Festivals are, as Troxler says, nothing like what we experience every weekend in the clubs. Sure you can go out and get blitzed on a Friday night but house and techno nights aren’t about excess or aggression. It’s about a group of people under one roof, dancing to the music we love. All played by the DJs who are there for the same reason we are, not some grossly overpaid arsehole who presses play on the Beatport top ten. This is not to say that festivals aren’t a brilliant weekend but they don’t represent what the underground is about. They are less about the music and more about getting fired up, wearing vintage army jackets, taking selfies and passing out in a Dutch mans tent.

The media tarnishes us all with the same brush, being condemned as a group of debauched dangerous drug fueled idiots, when as ever it is always a select few who ruin it for us all. To some people this might all be their cup of tea, but as far as I’m concerned this type of festival-culture does not reflect the music-culture I know and love. I would not want to be branded under the same stereotype the general public would assume to us and feel deeply saddened by the image the death at Parklife portrayed about our culture as a whole.

For now, I will take my small dark club and return home in the early hours of the morning rather than a staggered search for a muddy tent whilst a group of fifteen-year-old girls scream at each other because ‘somebodies drank the last Strongbow’.


Words by George Smith

Images from Cgplux