Credit: Glastonbury Festival / Andrew Allcock

Lucy Harbron

Fri 3 January 2025 9:52, UK

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Glastonbury Festival have revealed their profits more than doubled during the latest financial year to £5.9million.

After launching in 1970 as a humble affair, it has grown to a huge event involving 210,000 people attending Worthy Farm to attend Glastonbury on a yearly basis. However, the festival is still run by its founders, as Michael Eavis and his team still host the event on their land in Pilton, Somerset.

In addition to the scale growing intensely, with the festival now involving over 100 stages and over 2000 acts each year, the cost of attending the festival has increased exponentially. In 1970, tickets were £1, equivalent to £19.39 in 2024. Now, a ticket to the 2025 event costs £378.50, as well as an additional £5 booking fee per ticket and £10.25 for postage.

The price of attending the festival has risen year upon year. From a financial perspective, the model is clearly working for Glastonbury, as they revealed they made £5.9m in pre-tax profits for the year to March 2024, a steep rise from £2.9m the year before. During that same period, the festival also made some major charitable giving, donating £5.2m to organisations including Oxfam, Greenpeace, and WaterAid.

A spokesperson for the festival chalked the results up to good luck with the weather, stating that “successful, dry Glastonburys in both 2023 and 2024″ had helped to “rebuild the event’s vital financial reserves”. They also said that the team were happy that they could “continue to support good causes and charities”.

These positive financial results come as a huge relief to the festival team, who claimed that they were still recovering from the impact of Covid-19 and the cancellation of the festival during the pandemic on two occasions, which a spokesperson said resulted in “costing the festival millions”.

Neil Young hits out at Glastonbury’s corporate ties

The timing of the financial profits comes after Neil Young became the latest to share his critique of Glastonbury as he announced that he was pulling out of the 2025 lineup.

Young was heavily rumoured to headline the festival in 2025. On New Year’s Day, the musician confirmed that to be true in a statement on his website but quickly squashed anyone’s excitement by announcing his withdrawal from the festival. “The Chrome Hearts and I were looking forward to playing Glastonbury, one of my all-time favourite outdoor gigs,” he wrote, but then stated, “We were told the BBC was now a partner in Glastonbury and wanted us to do a lot for things we were not interested in.”

“It seems Glastonbury is now under corporate control and is not the way I remember it being. We will not be playing Glastonbury on this tour because it is a corporate turn-off and not for me like it used to be,” he added as a major criticism of the festival.

The connection between Glastonbury and the BBC is nothing new. The broadcaster has been in partnership with the festival since 1997.

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