Fans spent £355 ($450) this year for tickets to the world’s biggest music festival, Glastonbury, which sold out in less than an hour back in November last year.
Thousands of people began pouring into Worthy Farm in southwest England as the Glastonbury music festival kicked off on Wednesday, with hundreds of artists including Dua Lipa, Coldplay and Shania Twain wowing fans. The festival, which sold out without tickets within minutes even before the line-up was revealed, will close on Sunday with R&B singer SZA and “The Weekend” on the Pyramid’s main stage, Reuters reports.
This year’s edition will also feature Afrobeats sensation Burna Boy, rapper Little Simz, American electro-rock group LCD Soundsystem, English singer PJ Harvey and K-pop group Seventeen. Sunny weather greeted fans who arrived at Worthy Farm carrying backpacks and camping gear. James Trusson, 30, a sound engineer from Somerset who queued overnight to be one of the first to arrive, said he had been coming to Glastonbury for 11 years.
“It’s that magic that you just don’t get at any other festival,” he said. ”There really is no better feeling. It’s magical.”Affectionately known as Glasto, the festival was started by dairy farmer Michael Eavis in 1970, with artists performing to 1,500 people who bought £1 tickets which included free milk from the farm. For more than 50 years and with its current capacity of over 200,000 people, the site becomes a colorful and sometimes muddy little tent city for five days almost every June.
Tickets are expensive but…
The price for the biggest festival in the world is expensive even for the British, but they are comforted by the fact that they can see the best that the world music industry has to offer in one place.
The Exit festival in Novi Sad is an opportunity to see similar performers if you live in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. The prices are acceptable and start at 100 euros for the four days of the festival. But a logical question arises, what enables Novi Sad, Zagreb or Belgrade to bring the biggest music stars and why do people from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), apart from tickets, have to spend money on transport and accommodation and why don’t they have something like that in their homeland? Infrastructure! Very simple. BiH, like the capital Sarajevo, does not have an infrastructure that would meet the requirements of big music stars.
BiH is bypassed because no organizers dare to take such big risks, the halls in Sarajevo, Zetra and Skenderija, do not have the capacity to fulfill the demands of agencies and managers of Dua Lipa, Rolling Stones or The Weekend.
Neglected halls, terrible acoustics, press boxes, backstage, fire escapes, communication channels, plumbing, all this is in a very bad condition in the two largest halls in the country.
Ok, we also understand the justifications that these performers and the big productions that accompany them are expensive, but the financial benefits brought by such an event can simply cover those costs without major analyses and risk assessments.
Those who lead politics in BiH do not want or do not understand that such an event brings millions of benefits to the host city and its residents, as well as to the city and state budget. An example is the Sarajevo Film Festival, which brings huge profits to the City of Sarajevo, Forbes writes.
E.Dz.
