Commercializing the Carnivalesque: The V Festival and Image/Risk Management

Abstract

The V Festival has been held since 1996, and was the fi rst large-scale outdoor rock and pop music festival in Britain to be held at two sites simultaneously over one weekend. Developed as a mainstream alternative to the Glastonbury and Reading Festivals, it struggled to create a distinctive identity or gain critical acceptance, especially among the more radical or countercultural of festival-goers and press. Managed by a consortium of highly successful concert promoters, it actively embraces commercialism, sponsorship deals, and a forward-thinking ethos of quality and customer service. However, rather than escaping the countercultural and carnivalseque imagery and meanings historically associated with outdoor rock and pop music festivals it has, to varying degrees, commodifi ed, modernized, or subverted them. In the process, it has gained considerable popularity among festival-goers and secured the plaudits of music industry professionals. The event is at the forefront of initiatives regarding festival policing and safety, and offers a role model for the many new commercial events that are established each year. This article considers how the concept of the countercultural carnivalesque has been used in relation to large-scale outdoor music festivals, before examining the V Festival through a cultural economic focus. It demonstrates how the beliefs and backgrounds of its organizers have infl uenced the management and image of the event, and how it has helped to transform the large-scale outdoor music festival market more generally.

Festival space: gender, liminality and the carnivalesque

“…However, unlike Anderton's (2009) research, societal rules and social norms seem to exist within the liminal space rather than simply 18 being restored at the end. Therefore it is difficult to understand to what extend festival spaces can be said to actively resist and oppose gender norms and expectations.…”

Should there be more showers at the summer music festival? Studying the contextual dependence of resource consuming conventions and lessons for sustainable tourism

“…Although music festivals have more often been studied as a commercial opportunity than an embodied encounter (Bowen and Daniels, 2005;Browne, 2009;Anderton, 2008), qualitative studies have provided a number of insights into the lived experience of festivals (Holloway, Brown and Shipway, 2010). One of the most common features explored in this research is how the enjoyment of attendance partly stems from how festivals present an 'escape' from, or 'alternative' to, the apparent drudgery of everyday life, often drawing on historical accounts of how festivals have long served as an effective means of maintaining the societal status quo by providing a 'safety valve' (Anderton, 2008) through which revellers are allowed temporarily to subvert wider social norms (Getz, 2010).…”

“…One of the most common features explored in this research is how the enjoyment of attendance partly stems from how festivals present an 'escape' from, or 'alternative' to, the apparent drudgery of everyday life, often drawing on historical accounts of how festivals have long served as an effective means of maintaining the societal status quo by providing a 'safety valve' (Anderton, 2008) through which revellers are allowed temporarily to subvert wider social norms (Getz, 2010). As such, Browne (2009) discusses how a women-only festival in the US can be exciting, but is also something for which respondents must feel they 'are ready ' and Jaimangal-Jones et al (2010) describe how the appeal of the music festival derives from the 'liminal' space of unexpected and unusual experiences that it offers.…”

“…Surprisingly, in view of how the outdoor festival is both celebrated and vilified in the mass media when heavy rainfall encourages attendees to revel in muddy conditions (Anderton, 2008), how people cope with an environment that one could easily label 'dirty' has been only tangentially addressed in terms of how this features in the apparent 'escape' of the festival. Though some respondents in Browne's (2009) study talk positively about communal showers representing an enjoyable return to 'the land', others determinedly downplay the physical conditions in discussion with potential recruits for fear of deterring them.…”

Meaningful-Experience Creation and Event Management: A Post-Event Analysis of Copenhagen Carnival 2009

“…In this sense, we do not accept all types of sponsorships. 8 An experience setting is supported by cultural, visual and aesthetic expectations of what a carnival experience 'is' (Anderton 2009). It is also vital for the production of the event's themed totality that the culture workers in the organisation have core competences in how specific cultural signs and symbols are communicated through the design of event materiality.…”