Phil Hayes looks set for another busy summer.
Ask the CEO of ticketing specialists TicketSellers and crew and artist management system Eventree how many festivals he’s working across over the next few months, and he says it’s in the ballpark of 150.
Early indications as to the health of the impending festival season are good.
“For summer ’24, we reckon that ticket sales are down a little bit on ’23 events. But we did some analysis for the first 90 days of sales across a whole range of our clients, and we reckon the ticket revenue is up by about 20%, which is a really strong sign this early on.
“People who want to go to a festival, who've got the money to go to a festival, are willing to spend more to get more out of that experience.”
As for why punters are willing to make that investment?
“I think that's sort of fed a little bit by influencer culture. Because what's presented to you through social media by the influencer, you get the best of the best. You're not going to see them camping in the mud and all the negative sides of a UK festival. They'll rock up, they'll go straight to a pre-pitched yurt or something, they'll have a glass of champagne – it's going to show you a premium experience.
“And I think people want to tap into that.”
Here, Hayes outlines five key ticketing trends he expects to see in the European summer festival season. “These are a mix of good and bad,” he smiles.
“As I mentioned, on average, revenue seems to be up considerably by 20% compared to last year.
“This is perhaps people looking to get a more premium experience when they go to an event. But I think it's also indicative of the fact that organizers have realized that the best way to monetize their audience and to extract a bit more revenue is to put more upfront.
“For example, we had a client come to us and he said, 'Our biggest problem is that our festival sells out straight away, and then we don't have any engagement from [the audience] until they come to the festival. And what we really want is for those people to come back to our website and start to buy all the extra packages that we're selling – the pre-pitched camping, the glamping, maybe buying some merchandise.'
“And they said, 'Our problem is because people are done and dusted, they've got the ticket, we can't entice them back.'
"On average, revenue seems to be up considerably by 20% compared to last year."
“And what we've worked with them on is a strategy to try and get those add-ons and the upsells there from day one. Because historically, what organizers have done is the big on sale day, which is one of your big opportunities to sell, [but] you just get the entry tickets on there.
“But it is a missed opportunity. And I think people have got wise to that.
“And so now when an event goes on sale, it's much more common to see everything being offered upfront. And I think that's why we're seeing that uplift in spend, because although maybe slightly fewer people are buying – we've seen that the volume of sales is down by about two, maybe two-and-a-half per cent – people are spending a bit more, because the opportunity is there to do so.
“[Organizers] are putting more on to their ticketing platform from day one, rather than drip feeding these things.”
“I think that leads into the second trend, which is the huge embrace of payment plans.
“Going back to 2021 [around 4% of Gen Z] would use payment plans across our events. 2024, about 10% of Gen Z customers are using payment plans. So we've more than doubled. And that's I think a combination of things. You've got slightly higher prices, combined with wage stagnation in the UK, so it makes sense that people are tapping into that kind of thing.
“And I think a huge cultural change has happened as well – Klarna burst onto the scene, and kind of made it acceptable, maybe even desirable, fashionable, to buy things and just spread the cost of paying for them.
“More organizers are offering it, [and] that's a big change from the organizers’ point of view, because it's not guaranteed income – you've got no guarantee they're going to finish that plan.
“But more and more organizers are going, well, it's worth the risk, because I can probably get more people to buy in. And then because it's a payment plan, that problem with engagement goes away, because now I'm going to have regular contact with that customer – every month there's an opportunity to reach out and say, ‘Hey, remember a payment's going to be taken in a couple of days, make sure you've got the funds available. And by the way, did you know we’re also selling this? Why don’t you add those to your payment plan?’
“So it gives you lots more touch points with the customer."
"About 10% of Gen Z customers are using payment plans. So we've more than doubled."
“We did a load of data crunching recently.
“Pre-pandemic, about 40% of our sales came from Gen Z. But as we've moved into this sort of post pandemic world, Gen Z is now down to about 10% of the people buying tickets for the clients that we're working with.
“The Association of Independent Festivals has got their First Festival campaign, because what they've recognized is that some of those Gen Zs that are becoming old enough to go to festivals, they're just not going. And they're kind of looking at why and it's a combination, we think, of having grown up in lockdown – so they missed out on some of those first experiences, like going to the pub for the first time, going to a gig for the first time. They became the age to do those things at a time when they just physically couldn't go out.
“And then combining that with the ability to communicate and maintain friendships and relationships remotely using the apps and their phones and everything else, maybe people feel less need to go to mass gatherings.
“It is a problem, because we've potentially lost three quarters of that age group in terms of their buying festival tickets over the last three years or so.
“Millennials seem to be where the most growth happened. Millennials are now probably quite firmly established in their careers, they've perhaps got a bit more disposable income, maybe as well it's become a bit more acceptable to take your family to festivals. And of course, if you're buying family tickets, you're buying more tickets.”
“The divide between the festivals that are doing well, and festivals that are doing not so well, seems to be widening each year.
“On the one hand, you've got festivals that will sell out straightaway.
“But at the other end, we've seen so many festivals that are struggling to sell enough tickets, to the extent that there are quite a few independents that have either decided not to go ahead this year, or they've already announced that this is going to be their last year.
“What we're seeing some festivals doing [in response], which I think is really clever, is they've just said, okay, what is our audience breakdown? You've got families that come, you've got people that come for the ethos, the well-being aspects, that sort of thing. And then you've got the people that go, I just want to go in a field, I want to dance till the sun comes up.
“The divide between the festivals that are doing well, and festivals that are doing not so well, seems to be widening each year."
“Those three groups go to a lot of the same events but are looking for very different experiences. So a few of our clients are now going, okay, what we'll do instead of having one festival that tries to have different zones and appeal to those different groups of people, we're going to run three different events.
“So splitting the events does an amazing job of spreading the risk. You're now running three smaller events, and if one doesn't go so well, that's fine, because you've still got two others that will probably generate enough income for your business.
“And if you start to go even further and say, well, maybe they don't need to be camping events anymore, maybe we could do day events instead, by not having people sleeping at the event overnight, you remove a whole load of risk and cost from the operation.”
“The risk profile has changed for running a festival. This is coming from the position of someone running a ticket agency.
"If you're running an independent festival, you're probably not sitting on a huge amount of cash to bankroll events, you're very dependent on selling enough tickets for the event to happen.
“And so what happens is, you go to your ticket agent and you say, in order to make this event happen, I need regular releases of ticket funds so that I can pay suppliers their deposits, pay down payments for artists, all that kind of thing. And it's a bit of a gamble. The organizer is hoping that they will sell enough tickets that by the time the event happens, they'll have made enough money for it to go ahead and, on a good day, make a profit on top of that.
“And this is what I mean by the risk. Because the gap that needs to be closed between the ticket sales and the cost of running an event just seems to be widening each year. Supply costs just keep going up. But the price of the ticket doesn't seem to be able to go up at the same amount.
“So you end up in this position where the organizer is faced with this prospect of, if I don't manage to sell enough tickets, then not only will my event not go ahead, but I might have had to pay a load of deposits so I now can't refund everyone, which is a horrible position to be in. So who has to share that risk? The ticket agent.
"The risk profile has changed for running a festival."
“To give you a concrete example of this, we had an organizer come to us who needed all of the ticket money upfront, and it's about 700,000 Pounds. They wanted us to advance that much money as the sales came in – we weren't lending the money, but they wanted that much money to come from our bank to their bank so they could pay for all the things they needed to pay for for the event to happen.
“And the net profit for us, after all the processing and everything else, was about 14,000 Pounds. So for the prospect of making 14,000 Pounds, there's the risk of losing 700,000 Pounds if the event’s unable to go ahead and recoup those funds from the organizer. We said, ‘No, that just doesn't stack up for us.’
“So the best we do is we try and work with them to try to make sure that releases match expenditure so that we can justify to the bank, for example, that the money that we're releasing to the organizer is being spent on things that need to be in place for the event to happen.
“We help them with their marketing to make sure that their sales are on track to understand the data, who's buying tickets; but on an individual festival basis, try and make sure they've got as much knowledge and information they can have to inform their spending decisions before they spend the money.
“But suddenly it appears to be a much riskier industry to operate in than it used to be.”
Visit TicketSellers here and Eventree here. Follow Phil on LinkedIn.
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