Why do festival line-ups keep getting weirder and weirder?
The dazzling disparity of moving from K-pop to Neil Young is so startling that it could damage the corneas of an entire crowd, but you still wouldn’t be surprised to see such a mismatched booking at one of this year’s many festivals. Curation is now a thing of the past, limited to a few rare day events like All Points East, and a mix-up of maddening diversity is the mainstay.
The question is, why? It’s not easy to book a festival; it is a mammoth operation. So, you can guarantee that plenty of meetings have taken place prior to the line-up being announced, where the Sugababes being sandwiched by Deftones and the ghost of Burt Bacharach have been discussed and approved. Music fans, particularly those of a certain age, might wonder why.
It wasn’t always the case that festivals would sport such a breadth of artists. As little as a decade ago, most line-ups adhered to an identifiable genre. So, what has happened within that decade? Well, perhaps the most important and obvious factor is the advent of streaming. Platforms like Spotify have broadened our tastes.
People are no longer tied to a single, favourite radio station, TV channel, or record store, and in the broad macrocosm of streaming, genre boundaries have diminished. The youth of today, who remain the largest market for any festival, are less likely to tribally adhere to a single style of music as they are continually served an unending whirlwind of music.
According to Statista, the average Spotify user now listens to 40 unique tracks per day. That’s a hell of a lot more new music than MTV2 used to offer. So, festivals are, naturally, responding by booking a wider range of artists. However, there is still a stark caveat that needs answering: why do these disparate artists so frequently follow on from each other on the same stage? Surely, even though youngsters might listen to 1990s power ballads, math rock, rap, and Miles Davis, they’re not doing so in the same sitting?
Have algorithms changed our music taste?
Well, actually, yes, they are. A German study in 2023 found that TikTok-style feeds flood us with an array of different emotions and ‘vibes’, because the novelty nature of something surprising at every click keeps us hooked in a dopamine loop. The study also rather troublingly found that this reduced our prospective memory by around 40%. But in the more trivial context of a festival, that means that by the time a sound-checking interval has been undertaken, the crowd is ready for the next thing, and if it is more of the same, it can actually have an adverse effect.
Still, questions remain. Another oddity you often find on modern line-ups is an artist you have never heard of taking up a prominent spot at a global festival. Likewise, you might find a legacy act rising back up through the ranks without releasing any new music. Once again, this is tied to algorithms. For instance, Shaboozey was given a prominent position on the Other Stage at Glastonbury, and this was largely because he had recently gone viral on TikTok.
These days, a single ‘buzz’ song that has been favoured by the algorithm and gained one billion plays can attract a massive crowd to a whole set. Festivals now pay close attention to these metrics, hoping to catch some of that marketing buzz by booking acts who are ‘trending’ as well as those who have amassed fans more organically.
Lastly, these odd mixed-bag line-ups have become the norm. Crowds expect to hotfoot from stage to stage, with the playlist-like experience becoming part of modern festival culture. So, while on the surface, it might look downright bizarre to see Craig David, Lola Young and Butthole Surfers share a stage at an event hosted by Owen Jones, but these are bizarre times, line-ups merely reflect them.
