Festivals aren’t content, they’re a community. When you treat culture like a commodity, you end up with soulless weekends. Respect the scene or get out! Says Will Lardner, festival director and freelance event production specialist…

Let’s not dress this up in polite industry language because polite industry language is half the reason this mess keeps happening. Festivals are being ruined by people who don’t belong here. Not by weather, not by licensing and not by “the economy”.

They’re being ruined by people who got into this because they smelled money, not meaning. Who treat the audience like livestock and the line-up like a stock market. The kind of people who wouldn’t recognise the soul of a festival if it punched them in the mouth. And the worst part? We’ve normalised it.

We’ve accepted that this is just how it goes. We’ve been trained to shrug and say, “Well, it’s a business”. We’ve been gaslit into thinking we’re naïve for wanting it to be about music, community, culture and those rare, unrepeatable moments where the whole world feels like it lines up for five minutes.

But here’s the truth. It is a business, yes, but it’s not a normal business. It’s not selling stocks or phone contracts or whatever product you can shift without ever meeting the customer. This is a business where the product is a human experience, the raw material is emotion, and the consequences of greed aren’t just bad reviews, they can be dangerous.

When you overpromise and underdeliver in this industry, you don’t just disappoint people. You break the spell, you kill trust, and you poison the well for everyone else.

Because there are two types of promoter. One type gets into this because they’ve got something to share. A sound or a culture. A weird obsession with a particular kind of music that makes their heart beat faster and their brain go quiet. They’re doing it because they want to build something that didn’t exist yesterday. They want to give people a place to belong. They want to create a weekend that feels like a secret society made of strangers who somehow all understand each other without speaking.

The other type gets into this because they want to rinse it. They want the lifestyle, the status, the VIP wristbands, and their own backstage areas. They want to be seen as a tastemaker without ever doing the hard part of building taste. These people don’t build scenes, they harvest them. They don’t create culture, they consume it and they certainly don’t nurture communities. They monetise them.

RESPECT THE AUDIENCE

The problem is that industry keeps handing these type of people the keys, because on paper they look “successful”. Big ticket numbers with big sponsorship, trendy headliners, and unrealistic growth projections. The sort of glossy metrics that make investors and lazy journalists clap like trained seals. But none of that means the festival is good.

They fail for one simple reason: they don’t respect the audience. They don’t understand that when someone buys a ticket, they’re not just buying entry: they’re buying a promise. They’re buying the idea that for a few days they can step out of their normal life and into something bigger, something that feels like it matters. They are handing you their weekend, their money, their time off work, and their hope. They’re saying, “Go on then. Show me something worth believing in”. And if you don’t deliver, you don’t just lose a customer. You lose trust.

THE INVISIBLE GLUE

Trust is the only currency that matters in festivals. It’s the invisible glue holding together every decision people make when they choose your event over another. It’s the reason they bring their friends. It’s the reason they buy early bird tickets without even seeing the line-up. It’s the reason they forgive you when it rains, the toilets are struggling, and the queues are long because they know you tried, they know you care, they know you’re not taking the piss.

These other festivals don’t have that. They don’t want it. Trust is slow, takes years, and requires humility and competence. Trust requires you to spend money on boring things like welfare, accessibility, safety, design and all the other unsexy infrastructure that stops your festival becoming a shit show. They’d rather spend it on fireworks and influencer content. They’d rather spend it on a headline act that looks good on a poster.

COPY AND PASTE

Many festivals now feel like the same copy paste weekend. Same line up, same overpriced bars, same “immersive” nonsense, and the same cheap aesthetic pretending to be magic. Because when you’re not building from love, you’re building from templates.

Overpromising and underdelivering is the disease of modern festivals. It’s the quickest way to lose trust in festivals, in business, and in life. It’s what happens when someone sells big dreams but can’t back them up with reality, when they talk louder than they can act, when they sell an experience that doesn’t exist and then act surprised when people turn up expecting what they were promised.

We’ve all seen it. The whole industry is bloated with noise merchants. Overpromising looks confident, it looks like “vision”. In the long term, it makes you a liar. And every time you fail to meet expectations, you chip away at trust until eventually there’s nothing left. Then you’re finished.

RICHES IN THE NICHES

If you’re an independent promoter right now, here’s the harsh reality – you cannot compete with the big boys on scale. You can’t outspend them, you can’t out headline them and you certainly can’t out market them either. So stop trying.

The fastest way to die in this industry is trying to copy a big festival with a small budget. That’s how you end up with the worst of both worlds: the stress of scale and none of the money to achieve it or pay anyone.

The way you win is by doing the things these big brands can’t: by being real and by building something that feels like it belongs to the people who attend it.

There are riches in the niches. Because the niche isn’t small: it’s focused. It’s loyal, it has its own identity and its own community. The kind of crowd that doesn’t just buy tickets, they wear the merch, they talk about it all year, they come back because it’s theirs. And when you get that right, you don’t need to chase trends. You don’t need to beg for attention. You don’t need to pretend you’re something you’re not.

PEOPLE WHO CARE

The real professionals, the ones who last, the ones who build reputations that survive bad weather and a shit economy, don’t shout. They don’t sell fantasies they can’t afford. They speak honestly and they plan carefully. They surprise people with quality, reliability, and they actually care. They make people feel safe, looked after, and respected. They deliver more than they said they would because they understand that the best marketing isn’t ads… it’s trust.

LOVE WINS

We need to stop applauding the wrong people. We need to stop treating big numbers as proof of quality. We need to stop pretending that “selling out” means you delivered something meaningful. We need to stop letting these vultures set the tone for what festivals should be because they don’t even understand what festivals are.

Festivals aren’t content farms and they aren’t “brand activations”. They aren’t an excuse for corporate teams to cosplay as ravers for a weekend. They are living, breathing cultural gatherings. They are our modern rituals and they are where people go to feel human again in a world that feels increasingly tough at times.

So if you’re in this industry and you’re doing it for the love, for the craft, for the people, for the music, please keep going. Keep building, keep delivering, and keep proving that festivals can still be made with soul.

And if you’re one of the culture vultures, one of the hype merchants who sees crowds as cash machines then here’s my honest advice: F*@k off. This isn’t for you.

Images: Unsplash/Johnny Such/Tijs Van Leur