Why losing music festivals signals a wider problem
The total number of summer music festivals now cancelled or postponed in Scotland this summer has reached eight. This is a depressing reflection on the extent to which the economy is delivering quality of life in Scotland, and is explained away by a litany of macroeconomic explanations which do not describe what is actually happening.
Every music festival in trouble cites 'rising costs' as a key factor in their demise. Given the scale that corporate monopoly has reached in a lot of these supply chains and the fact that the underlying driver for a lot of these increased costs is energy price speculation, we need to start thinking in terms of 'an economy which is now hostile to certain kinds of activity'.
That is reinforced by the second factor, which is always cited – the 'cost of living'. This is just a euphemism created to avoid saying that people's free disposable income has been under assault for 15 years. Even where it has risen, it has done so in the face of cost rises. Yet again, this is an economy ill-suited to encouraging participation where there is any kind of cost barrier.
Music festivals are everything the modern economy does not like – they are one-off events that are by nature transitory experiences in a world where the model is subscriptions, which get you trapped once and keep you paying for the same service or product forever. Capitalism does not want you at a music festival; it wants you to spend that money on five TV streaming services.
Music festivals are low-margin, high-employment enterprises. The modern economy does not like businesses that return small margins based on large staff cohorts, but businesses that return high margins based on proprietary computer code and 'walled gardens' that reduce competition. To put it another way, money which might have been spent on music festivals is being directed into online gambling and similar activities.
Music is being dominated not by independent festivals but by corporate blockbuster events like the Taylor Swift or Oasis tours. These are large corporate events run by one of the most corrosive monopolist companies in the world. Ticketmaster (which has a chokehold on concert ticketing with 80 per cent of the market) is a subsidiary of Live Nation (which owns most big event venues and has a 70 per cent market share). These absorb the space for independent festivals.
We are seeing this almost continually just now. Businesses that would have been considered solid performers only a few years ago are seen as basket cases now because they are predicated on paying staff in a time of price volatility but generate comparatively low profits. Simply put, if you are running a cafe or a pub or a small local shop, the chances are you would be better off selling up, buying a property and running it as an short term rental.
The description of the economy above is one of a rentier economy in which profit isn't based on the creation of new value through production, but on charging for access to existing products people need. The fact that the fragmentation of consumer markets and society as a whole is a good way to promote a rentier economy is the final nail in the coffin for festivals.
We are almost literally being trained by our phones to stay at home and spend our money in little dribs and drabs as in-game purchases or random consumerism from cheap retailers or on gambling or subscription services, or for use of AI tools we don't really need and so on.
Forking out significant sums for a weekend in a field, probably with bad toilets, very possibly in the pouring rain, listening to music while crammed together with tens of thousands of other people, is becoming everything the modern economy does not want you to do.
And yet its potential benefits are enormous. Four years ago, Common Weal spent the weekend at the Doune the Rabbit Hole festival, organising their programme of talks and discussions. The whole team spent the weekend in Stirlingshire and it was a first time at a festival for one of our staff from the time, Nicola Biggerstaff.
To say the experience was a positive and transformative one for her would be an understatement. In a piece she wrote just after her visit, she describes a life-changing experience that made her feel positivity and connectedness to other people she hadn't experienced before. If you want to be uplifted on a dark day in a grim week, it makes for an uplifting read.
The arts, culture, participation, community events, festivals, gala days, family fun days, open days – these are all the social functions which bind a society and a community together and they are not just 'another aspect of GDP'. If we as a society do not start to make some collective value judgements which overrule the judgements of crude markets about what is important to society, we will lose what is important to society.
Common Weal would like to develop a model to secure arts, culture, sport and festivals. We would like to explore an advertising tax, a set spend levied on all advertising and marketing, which would be earmarked to fund festivals. Advertising has minimal social usefulness but is exactly the mechanism driving us to gamble online rather than dance together in a field.
We are losing more than we are gaining in our society just now. We need to fight back.