ABSTRACT
Music festivals have long played a significant role in British live music culture. In Europe, arts festivals have been thought of politically since at least the start of the 1960s. As early as 1957, the European Music Festival Association (EMFA), founded in 1952, responded to criticism of its members’ elitism by interviewing “eighty celebrities from the music industry” in order to “show the positive role of festivals in European culture”. The British Association of Festival Organisers, representing community festivals, was created in 1987. By 2010, music festivals were clearly commodities in themselves, a sector of the much broader market for “events”. One sign of this development was the evolution of Virtual Festivals.com. The festival businessmen quoted blamed this situation on various factors: the economic downturn, infrastructure problems caused by bad weather and the squeeze on public spending.
