Music Festivals in the UK by Chris Anderton

Author:Chris Anderton
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

This short paragraph neatly sums up objections to the presence of corporate sponsorship and commercialism at British music festivals and is echoed by a number of academics. For instance, Klein argues that ‘when any space is bought, even if only temporarily, it changes to fit its sponsors’ (2000: 51), while McAllister notes that ‘[the event] becomes subordinate to promotion because, in the sponsor’s mind and in the symbolism of the event, they [the event] exist to promote’ (1996: 221). Mistrust regarding the motivations of corporate sponsors can turn to criticisms about their presence. For instance, a review of the 2004 V Festival stated that ‘the relentless adverts, plastered over every surface and played on big screens between every band … [made] festivalgoers feel less like music fans and more like rats in a giant marketing experiment’ (Smyth, 2004).

However, as noted above, it would appear that festivalgoers’ attitudes toward sponsorship and branding is more supportive or accepting than these views might suggest. This reflects broader shifts in how branding, marketing and advertising activity in general has become integrated into contemporary consumer society and media. For instance, in the 1990s, commercial satellite and cable television significantly expanded the range of channels available to the public in the UK, and thereby also the amount of commercial advertising that viewers could be exposed to. Since then, brand opportunities have extended to include the sponsorship of individual programmes or sets of programmes and, since February 2011, paid-for product placements have been allowed on British television. This permits companies to pay for their products to be seen or mentioned within programmes, which helps to integrate brands into storylines and contexts in a manner that traditional advertising could not. In addition, sponsorship and advertising have now become ubiquitous on popular internet and social media sites that offer free services on the basis of an indirect cross-subsidy model of funding (Anderson, 2009). Here, brands help to fund the running of the online platform by paying for advertising banners and links that appear on the site; in return, consumers receive the platform’s services for free. This encourages consumers to use the services, while providing the platform with income and the potential for up-selling to a premium, paid-for version of the service. The brands aim to profit from the relationship by gaining online exposure (much cheaper than traditional advertising) which they hope will be converted into attention, interest and subsequent sales opportunities when visitors click on the adverts and are directed to external brand websites.

Another shift in consumer society is the emergence of the so-called ‘millennial generation’, which has also been termed Generation Y, the Net Generation, the Experience Generation and the Me Generation. These terms all refer to people born at some point between the late 1970s and early 2000s – in other words the typical target demographic for commercial rock and pop festivals in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The millennial generation is said to have followed Generation X (born between the mid-1960s and the late

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