Glastonbury, one of the world’s biggest festivals, is back this week
The British event has seen revenue and profit boom in recent years.
In 1970, ~1,500 people descended on Worthy Farm to see a primitive version of glam rock band T. Rex — a last-minute replacement for The Kinks — a handful of other artists, some scaffolding, and not much else, by some accounts.
While Glastonbury is still held on that very farm and punters are greeted by Michael Eavis, the same man who started the festival 55 years ago, much has changed since the days when Glasto-goers paid £1 for entry and a free pint of milk.
Glastonomics
This year, tickets for the UK’s biggest festival sold out in minutes and cost £378.50, with over 200,000 revelers making the pilgrimage to Somerset — down 5% on the maximum capacity to avoid overcrowding, according to Eavis’ daughter, Emily, who now organizes the festival.
Putting its free-spirited origins to one side, that amount of people spending that amount of cash to see headline acts like Olivia Rodrigo, Neil Young, and The 1975 has turned Glasto into a money-spinning music metropolis.
Revenues obviously dwindle when the festival takes a year off, or a “fallow year,” every half decade or so to let the fields and farmland recover, with the company behind the event reporting an almost comically low £34 worth of turnover for all of 2006.
However, it rakes in plenty during the active years to keep the festival ticking over. For FY2024, Glastonbury posted a whopping £68 million in revenue, as people now snap up tickets for the festival before they even know who’s performing. Despite its impressive charitable endeavors, some critics — including one of this year’s headliners — have raised eyebrows at Glastonbury’s swelling coffers, with operating profit jumping to a record £4.7 million on the back of ever-rising ticket prices.
