Staging a music festival is an extremely risky thing. Everything works on a knife’s edge. And while a promoter can make an insane amount of money from a festival, everything has to go just right. But if things start to go wrong at any point, the failures can cascade into a disaster, financial and otherwise…
The basic logistics are daunting…you have to bring in a bunch of artists from all over the world, take care of all their transportation, accommodation, catering, and technical needs. Tens of thousands of people buy tickets to stand out in a field for one, two, three, or even four days at the mercy of the weather…
Think about it…you need staff, security, medical personnel, sanitary facilities, food suppliers, parking, public transportation, camping, power, permits, and a million other things, all working together…
And humans being humans, you can’t trust them…once you get tens of thousands—even hundreds of thousands—of people into a confined open space for an extended period of time and then add in drugs and alcohol, weird and bad things can happen.
Some promoters have got it down to a science/ Glastonbury, which began in 1970, sells out within minutes of tickets going on sale. It’s celebrated as the most famous music festival in the world. The UK also has Reading and Leeds, which have involved running two festivals in different cities on the same weekend since 1999…
The people behind Coachella and Lollapalooza have been able to consistently stage festivals for decades with only occasional glitches…
But then there are the disasters…Woodstock 1994 was an organizational nightmare, complete with bad weather. I know because I was there. It was eclipsed only by Woodstock 1999, which was so bad multiple documentaries were made about it…
And let’s not even get started on the disastrous Fyre Festival, a giant ripoff and boondoggle that saw people sent to jail…
This is Episode 64 of Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry.” These are the stories of two Canadian music festivals that crashed and burned. They’re both largely forgotten, too—probably for the best…
This is The Spectacular Failures of the Strawberry Fields and Edenfest Music Festivals.
In addition to the podcasts, you can hear Uncharted on these Corus radio stations (all times local):
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