Anyone who has bought a festival ticket in recent years knows the effect: prices have risen noticeably, in places considerably faster than general inflation.
The obvious explanation is greed. The actual cost structure is more interesting and explains rather more.
Fees are the largest block
The most obvious item, and it has risen sharply.
The background is a shift in the music business. When recordings were artists' main income, concerts partly functioned as promotion. With the move to streaming, which pays very little per play, live performance became the central revenue source.
Demands rose accordingly. For internationally sought-after acts, festivals worldwide compete for the same handful of names, which pushes prices further.
On top come exclusivity clauses: an artist playing one festival often may not appear within a defined radius and period. That restriction is paid for and adds to the booking cost.
Safety and permits
The cost block that has grown most and that audiences see least.
Safety planning for large events has become considerably more elaborate following several serious incidents. More staff, more sophisticated ingress and egress planning, capacity calculations, emergency plans, barriers, public address systems for announcements.
That's entirely correct and it costs a great deal. At larger festivals safety can account for a substantial share of the total budget.
Then there are regulatory requirements on noise, sanitation, medical provision, traffic and environmental protection, each individually justified and collectively a considerable burden.
Everything has to be built
Site rental deserves a mention too, since it has quietly become significant. Suitable locations — large, accessible, with tolerant neighbours and a council willing to grant permissions — are limited, and landowners have noticed. Multi-year contracts at rising rates are now normal, and a festival that loses its site frequently cannot find an equivalent one at any price.
A point easily underestimated: a festival in a field is the construction of a temporary small town.
Power, water, wastewater, roads, fencing, lighting, communications infrastructure, medical facilities, sanitary provision for tens of thousands of people. All of it delivered, erected, operated and dismantled.
Those costs have risen because materials have got more expensive, transport has got more expensive, and above all because staff are scarce.
The staffing shortage
A factor the industry considers particularly severe and which is discussed little publicly.
Event technology is a skilled trade with demanding training, irregular hours and extensive travel. During the pandemic hiatus many specialists left the sector and haven't returned.
The result is a market where qualified people are scarce and correspondingly expensive. And it affects not only technicians but security staff, drivers and build crews.
Insurance
The quietest cost block. Event cancellation insurance has become considerably more expensive after recent years, and certain risks are now barely covered or only with substantial restrictions.
That means organisers carry more risk themselves, and risk has to be priced in. A festival that must be cancelled in bad weather can ruin a promoter.
Why there are still so many festivals
Given this cost picture you might expect supply to shrink. In fact it has tended to grow, which looks contradictory at first.
Two explanations. First, the market has consolidated — larger promoter groups run multiple festivals and can spread costs across sites, bundle contracts and distribute risk. For independent organisers the situation is considerably harder, and there have indeed been cancellations and closures there.
Second, willingness to pay has risen. For part of the audience a festival is less a concert than a holiday, and prices are compared with travel costs rather than with gig tickets.
Where else the money goes
Weather deserves its own note, because it has become a bigger factor than most audiences realise.
Outdoor events are exposed to conditions, and the range of conditions organisers now plan for has widened. Heat plans requiring shaded areas and water provision, storm protocols requiring evacuation capacity, ground conditions after heavy rain that can make a site unusable for vehicles.
Each of these adds cost before a single ticket is sold, and they are not optional — most are regulatory requirements or insurance conditions.
The harder problem is that a cancellation decision often has to be taken while the site is already built and the acts are already contracted. At that point almost all of the cost has been incurred and none of the revenue is secure. Organisers describe this as the single most stressful aspect of the job, and it is a substantial part of why independent operators without a portfolio to spread risk across have been leaving the business.
Two items appearing on the customer's bill that don't reach the organiser.
Booking fees. Processing fees, service fees and delivery fees add up and frequently become visible only at the final step. Part goes to the ticketing platform.
And dynamic pricing, increasingly used — ticket prices that vary with demand. Accepted for airlines, received considerably worse for concerts, because it creates the sense of paying differently for the same thing.
What bothers people most, in my observation, isn't the price itself but the opacity. A high price communicated openly is accepted more readily than a low headline price that doubles during checkout.