The events of 2020

At the end of January 2020, when the World Health Organisation declared the outbreak of Covid-19 to be an international health emergency, there was a variety of reactions from government to government. However, in a matter of weeks, it was clear that music festivals and other large cultural gatherings were unlikely to proceed as normal.

On the 18^th March 2020, it was announced that the UK’s most popular music festival, Glastonbury, would have an enforced fallow year due to the pandemic. Meanwhile its United States counterpart, the Milwaukee Summerfest left it until the 4th June to cancel for 2020.

The outlook for 2021

To stick with these two examples from 2020, Glastonbury has announced that for the second year in a row, the festival will not go ahead, while Summerfest has been postponed until September. Event organisers said the decision was taken “to give health professionals more time to vaccinate the general public.”

President & Chief Executive Officer of Milwaukee World Festival, Inc., Don Smiley said: “While the progress made through the vaccine rollout is encouraging, we believe it is in the public’s best interest to hold the festival in September to give government leaders and healthcare organizations enough time to distribute the vaccine,”

These are sensible timelines for festivals of this size to adopt bearing the national interest and the preservation of public health in mind.

Meanwhile, Fairport’s Cropredy Convention, Europe’s largest folk music festival is going ahead as usual this Summer. The average age of Cropredy’s audience members is higher than the national average age, so many of their customers will have been fully vaccinated against the virus by the time the festival goes ahead.

Streaming your festival

It is understandable that different festivals will come to different conclusions about whether they can host their festival, but OnGenre can help your festival remain financially viable without inviting large crowds in person.

By streaming your festival online, you can introduce flexibility into your offering. If this year is too soon for you to invite crowds back again at full capacity, you might consider a couple of options.

OnGenre can allow you to sell tickets and broadcast your festival through your existing website

The first would be to take the whole festival online, streaming each event remotely via your existing website. However, especially for festivals taking place outdoors, it may be preferable to adopt the hybrid model, inviting a limited number of people back in person, while reaching additional audience members with your online stream.

Not only would this be a great way to take some steps back to something resembling normalcy in 2022, while protecting public health, but it’s likely to become an increasingly common way of marketing festivals and other online events, to take advantage of video streaming online and reach new, far-flung audiences.

Make sure to read about the hybrid model and how you can take advantage of our tiered ticketing system to see why with OnGenre’s help, your 2021 festival might still go ahead.