Branding, sponsorship and the music festival

Anderton, Chris

doi:10.5040/9781501309038.0020

Cited by 32 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…The Mean Fiddler Group took sole ownership of the event in 1993, creating a parallel festival in Leeds between 1999 and 2007. Both events were sponsored by the alcohol manufacturer Carling until 2007, when the Reading festival was managed (and re-branded) by Festival Republic (Anderton, 2015). Now primarily associated with rock and indie artists, the festival attracted around 87,000 people in 2008, with a predominantly young, White and more middle class audience, and weekend tickets cost £155.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘We achieve the impossible’: Discourses of freedom and escape at music festivals and free parties

Griffin

Bengry‐Howell

Riley

et al. 2016

Journal of Consumer Culture

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In this paper we explore the notion of freedom as a form of governance within contemporary consumer culture in a sphere where 'freedom' appears as a key component: outdoor musicbased leisure events, notably Music Festivals and Free Parties. 'Freedom' is commodified as central to the marketing of many music festivals, which now form a highly commercialised sector of the UK leisure industry, subject to various regulatory restrictions. Free parties, in contrast, are unlicensed, mostly illegal and far less commercialised leisure spaces. We present data from two related studies to investigate how participants at three major British outdoor music festivals and a small rural free party scene draw on discourses of freedom, escape and regulation. We argue that major music festivals operate as temporary bounded spheres of 'licensed transgression', in which an apparent lack of regulation operates as a form of governance. In contrast, free parties appear to "achieve the impossible" by creating alternative (and illegal) spaces in which both freedom and regulation are constituted in different ways compared to music festival settings.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘We achieve the impossible’: Discourses of freedom and escape at music festivals and free parties

Griffin

Bengry‐Howell

Riley

et al. 2016

Journal of Consumer Culture

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“…For those with the money, VIP areas are also available with a variety of perks unavailable to regular festivalgoers, which significantly undermines the carnivalesque notion of a flattening of hierarchies. Sponsor brands are also much more active within festival arenas, having shifted from simple "badging" activities (such as title sponsorships, or names and logos placed on posters, tickets, wristbands and so on) to the provision of experiential and retail areas that effectively privatize parts of the arena (Anderton 2015;2019a) Dan Krier and William J. Swart (2015) ask whether the contemporary music festival sector is an "economy of spectacle" (after Debord, 1967) which encloses that which should exist, or previously existed, in the cultural commons (Krier and Williams 2015, 9). In other words, that a cultural activity has become privatized by capitalist interests and enclosed in order to create a commercially exploitable commodity (20).…”

Section: The Countercultural Carnivalesquementioning

confidence: 99%

Music Festival Capitalism

Anderton

2021

The Oxford Handbook of Global Popular Music

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This chapter adds to a growing subfield of music festival studies by examining the business practices and cultures of the commercial outdoor sector, with a particular focus on rock, pop, and dance music events. The events of this sector require substantial financial and other capital in order to be staged and achieve success, yet the market is highly volatile, with relatively few festivals managing to attain longevity. It is argued that these events must balance their commercial needs with the socio-cultural expectations of their audiences for hedonistic, carnivalesque experiences that draw on countercultural understanding of festival culture (the countercultural carnivalesque). This balancing act has come into increased focus as corporate promoters, brand sponsors, and venture capitalists have sought to dominate the market in the neoliberal era of late capitalism. The chapter examines the riskiness and volatility of the sector before examining contemporary economic strategies for risk management and audience development, and critiques of these corporatizing and mainstreaming processes.

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“…This is reflected in including these sponsors in promotional materials, posters and logos of the festivals. From this perspective, new Polish music festivals are no different from their western counterparts, which also rely on sponsorship for their survival and sustainability (Anderton 2015).…”

Section: Festivalisation Of Popular Music After the Fall Of The Iron mentioning

confidence: 99%

The present and the future of Polish coastal music festivals

Mazierska¹

2020

The Future of Live Music

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In this chapter I present the history of three Polish popular music festivals, Open'er in Gdynia, Audioriver in Płock and Jazz na Molo (Jazz on the Pier) in Sopot, all taking place near the sea or a river. I also examine how they cater for their audiences and sustain themselves and speculate about their future, taking into account factors which are conducive for their survival and expansion and those which might negatively affect their sustainability and development. In my research I draw on the history of music festivals in Poland and the current situation of music and other festivals in this country, captured by the term 'festivalisation'. I draw on academic work on festivals, conducted in Poland and elsewhere, as well as information about festivals distributed by the media, including their websites. I also use interviews with their organisers and participants, as well as my own experience of attending two of them. Popular music festivals in Poland of state socialism After the Second World War Eastern European countries and Poland especially experienced the decimation of music venues, and nationalisation of the remaining ones, as well as subjecting them to centralised planning, governed by ideological principles rather than income generation. However, the more years that passed since WWII and Stalinism, the more spaces (literal and figurative) were created for the consumption of popular music. The watershed was the 1960s, when several popular music festivals were set up in Poland, which proved important cultural events, beginning with the International Music Festival in Sopot, in

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Branding, sponsorship and the music festival

Cited by 32 publications

References 0 publications

‘We achieve the impossible’: Discourses of freedom and escape at music festivals and free parties

‘We achieve the impossible’: Discourses of freedom and escape at music festivals and free parties

Music Festival Capitalism

The present and the future of Polish coastal music festivals

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