Glastonbury Music Festival: History, Size, and Challenges

Running head: GLASTONBURY MUSIC FESTIVAL
GLASTONBURY MUSIC FESTIVAL
Name of Student
Name of University
Author’s Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................2
Discussion............................................................................................................................2
Why was it created?.........................................................................................................2
Size and growth of the event...........................................................................................2
Complexity of the event...................................................................................................4
Legacy goals....................................................................................................................4
Issues faced by the event.................................................................................................5
Crowed control problem..............................................................................................5
Security issues.............................................................................................................6
Resource recovery.......................................................................................................7
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................8
References............................................................................................................................9

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Introduction
Glastonbury music festival is one of the greatest performing arts and music festival. It
can be considered as a template for almost all the festivals that have been introduced after it. The
major difference between other festivals and Glastonbury music festival is that it has all the best
parts of a good festival in a single astonishing bundle. For attending the event of Glastonbury, an
individual needs to involve a good amount of travelling and most probably a queue for getting in
but once all these hurdles are overcome, the individual enters into a huge city or a mini state that
is located under canvas (Ballantyne, Ballantyne & Packer, 2014). British rules apply in the event
as well but individuals are freer in this festival. Every individual is allowed to enjoy their wild
time in the way they want to. This assignment describes regarding the event in details, it further
discusses regarding the problems faced by the events as well.
Discussion
Why was it created?
Glastonbury music festival was introduced in order to provide various up and coming
artists a huge opportunity on radio, online and television. It has helped various artists to launch
their careers of acts like George Ezra, Jake Bugg, Florence, The Machine, Catfish, The
Bottlemen, Slaves, Rae Morris, James Bay, SOAK and many more (Gibson & Connell, 2016).
This platform had been a huge chance for artists to showcase their talent and win people’s hearts.
Size and growth of the event
Glastonbury Music Festival is an event of around five days. In thus event various artists
perform their arts contemporarily; it takes place in Pilton, Somerset. Along with contemporary

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music, the festival includes various events like dance, theater, comedy, cabaret, circus, and many
more arts (Croes & Lee, 2015). The leading rock as well as pop artist is usually in headlines,
along with thousands of artists who perform in smaller stages and various performance areas.
This event had first taken place on 19th September, 1970. The festival was actually called
a pop folk and blues festival at a working farm that takes place after the death of Jimi Hendrix.
The act actually included Keith Christians, Quintessence and Marc Bolan, there were overall
1500 attendants, the tickets were priced around 1 euro; the event also included free milk which
was provided from the farm. In 1981 the festival was finally named as Glastonbury festival and it
was held in the exact same location (Waroux, Saliba & Cottrell, 2016). The pyramid shaped
stage took around two months. The number of attendants was nearly 18,000 and the tickets were
priced at 8 Euros.
In the year of 1992, the amount collected from the profit made by the festival was
donated to a charity named Greenspace which backed the resurgence and revitalization of green
spaces and parks (Flinn & Frew, 2014). This year they had special guests for performing like
Tom Jones, DJ Harvey, Saw Doctors and The Levellers. The tickets were priced around 49 Euros
and the visitors were around 70,000.
In 2010, the festival celebrated its 40th anniversary; in this year a newly built reservoir
was presented which created million liters of water for the purpose of drinking. More number of
toilets and tapes were available for the attendees. For the special occasion, numerous acts were
performed for the first time (Fox, 2018). Various acts included Scissor Sisters, Kylie Minogue,
Mumford and sons and Shakira. Around 135,000 tickets were sold and 37,000 passes of crew,
stewards and perfrmers were sold. The Sunday tickets were price at 185 Euros.