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I sing and play guitar in a DIY pop band. We’ve been touring for the past few years, and have recently broken into the festival scene. Big festivals have grown explosively in the American music industry over the past two decades. Festivals like Coachella and Electric Zoo combine the summer camp and Agamben’s camp, creating a space where social norms are temporarily suspended. But these festivals are not rule-free — they are spaces where the behavior of musicians and fans is strictly regulated by a for-profit authority. Corporate music festivals are winning because they’ve innovated a contract that appeals to both the creative class and the consumer class, all while channeling profits and power into the hands of capital. The highly capitalized industry behind festivals has made this space the ascendant American experience of live music. Huge outdoor festivals have been around in Europe for a long time, but the US is catching up fast. Pop-punk and alt-rock traveling festivals like Lollapalooza and the Van’s Warped Tour took off in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, the traveling festivals had petered out, and regional festivals like Coachella became the new model. Since then, the industry has saturated every corner of the US with stationary, three-day festivals that cost upwards of $200 and attract more than 50,000 people. The early, big festivals’ fusion of alt-rock, classic rock, and mainstream pop acts has expanded in the last decade to include indie, hip hop, and electronic and dance acts. Along with market share, ticket prices and festival revenue have exploded. Coachella’s weekend ticket price in 2004 was $140. In 2014 the weekend ticket was $375, and the festival sold out in less than three hours. In 2007 Coachella grossed $17 million in revenue. By 2014 the festival had been extended to two weekends and took in $78 million. The rapid growth of mega-festivals is a physical expression of the increasingly aggressive class barriers and inequities that fracture the social economy of art and music. They offer only a few strictly defined identities. You can be a member of the creative elite; an owner of capital; hired staff; or a member of the policed, regulated audience. The fences, hierarchy of privileges, and security guards are a live theater version of our cultural life’s stratification.

Big Pay at High Cost The musicians who get tapped to play at big festivals get a temporary taste of how the contemporary art world rewards its creative elite. Perks include separate roads and parking; private space (typically trailers with sofas, stocked food, and air-conditioning); musicians-only lounges with open bars, hired masseuses and catered food; and gifts (cosmetics, liquor, chocolate) from festival sponsors — all provided by dedicated hospitality and tech support staff. Musicians also get to watch and rub shoulders with top musical acts in the VIP and backstage zones. In a time when most musicians’ income streams have narrowed fast, big festivals are offering serious pay. How much? The standard festival formula guarantees an advance fee for each artist, and even the smallest billed acts usually take home between $500–1000. Festival pay easily outcompetes what most bands earn at a local venue — young bands often get only $100–300 for their first shows away from their home turf. High pay comes with serious restrictions. Musicians must agree to a radius clause that prohibits them from performing within a radius (say one hundred miles) of the festival for a certain number of months (often six). The radius clause is also coupled with a subtler exclusivity clause: the inability of fans who can’t afford the $200+ ticket prices to enter a major festival. When a show at a high-cost festival will be your only show for six months in a region, you offer your working-class fans a cold silence. For many small to mid-sized bands, going on tour across the US is a tough financial prospect without having a few major festival dates, so it is now extremely common for bands to “anchor” their tours around festival dates. This means that the band (or its agents) waits to plan and book its schedule for other shows until the festival offers are locked up. The increasing centrality of festivals is troubling — it’s getting harder for bands to opt out. If I told my band and agent that I wanted to stop playing big corporate festivals, they would call me financially reckless and naïve— and they’d basically be right. Without the anchor of festivals, it’s very hard to earn enough on the road to support ourselves until the next tour. Higher pay doesn’t mean more power for musicians. At festivals, the band is a contractor in a weak bargaining position, not a partner. Bands don’t get a share of ticket revenue (like they do at most smaller venues). They get paid “what they’re worth,” which means a price slightly higher than a band could expect on a good night at a venue nearby. Good pay shouldn’t obscure the fact that bands don’t have a real voice or a fair share of the profits in the fastest growing part of the live music business. The big festival is a powerful contract between festival companies like LiveNation and musicians wielding creative power and consumer demand. Each side needs the other, but the musician’s position is far more insecure.

Fences for Music Browsers For the paying masses, big festivals provide a summer camp of Jumbotron wonders. As a music listening experience, the corporate festival is like HypeMachine in real space — a way to browse music, sorted by popularity, at a distance of non-commitment. Unless you camp out all day at the front of a single stage, you won’t get much closer than YouTube; you’ll watch the bigger acts from so far away you’ll only be able to make them out on the big screens. Unlike most music streaming apps, however, no payment can make your music ad-free; nearly all major festivals have embraced ubiquitous brand advertising as a revenue stream. The audience watches the music sets in a shopping mall of logos, sponsored content, and merchandise. The spaces where the crowd walks, listens, eats, uses the bathroom, sits, rests, and gets water are fully planned, surveilled, and policed by the festival company and its security staff. Steel fences line the walkways and guard the fifteen-foot buffer zones between the stage and crowd. Admission comes with a bracelet, containing an RFID chip that’s scanned by security staff at all gates to the privileged zones. Your social position is embedded on your wrist. The stratification of privilege at the big festivals plays out most brazenly in the VIP zones. For packages that regularly exceed $1,000, VIP ticket holders get private, guarded, fenced zones that are close to the stage, special parking, camping access, private access routes, bars, and food stands. Festivals have been diligently working to sweeten the deal for VIPs, with gift bags of snacks and booze, private queen-size bed tents with AC and security staff, and beer-stocked kiddie pools near the stage. The VIP zones become their own stages, showing the general admission the pleasures money can buy. Stratification isn’t novel, but the major festivals have started using colorful, upbeat camouflage to hide the intense restriction of space. Cartoon animals, patterned LED arrays, murals, adult playgrounds, and temporary fountains corral crowds, all while disguising the fences and restricted access zones. Festivals actively promote the idea of their space as a community with a culture of positivity. At Bonnaroo, the 90,000-capacity Tennessee festival, the official “Bonnaroo Code” urges the audience to “Radiate positivity” and “Consider the community.” The code implores the festival goers: “Don’t be that guy/gal” who’s a “vibe killer.” The festival annually surveys the audience with questions like, “Do you feel like part of a community at Bonnaroo?” and “Did you make new friends at Bonnaroo?” Bonnaroo says 74 percent of festival attendees answered “yes” to both questions. The consensus is not surprising — you’d have to be a real vibe killer to pay $275 and say, “No, I didn’t make new friends here.” For all its restrictions, the space of these festivals is attractive because it welcomes a certain kind of collective play. Along with the corporate promotion of unflinching positivity and community, the big festivals provide a laissez-faire environment, turning a blind eye to drug use, embracing colorful and revealing (and often blithely colonial) clothing, and providing a space where physical affection is ubiquitous — at least among friends and straight couples. And major festivals do allow one outlet for audience creativity: crowd members are permitted to make tall signs and flags, often outfitted with variations on web memes, to signal their location to friends across the crowd. (Getting lost in the crowd is a sure vibe killer.) While professing a culture of tolerance and encouraged weirdness, the demographics of the big music festivals speak of a narrower inclusiveness. The great bulk of general admission looks white and eighteen to twenty-five; the VIP zones luxuriate with well-clad twenty-eight to thirty-five-year-olds, speckled with a few wary old-timers. People of color are few and far between. And, as festivals squeeze audiences into a blandly “positive” community mold, little about the big festival space feels queer or welcoming of queerness (even though most festivalgoers are likely in the “I support gay marriage!” camp). The class barriers posed by big festivals need little explanation: working-class fans are cut off from seeing either the headliners or their favorite smaller acts, who otherwise might have cost them $10 to see at a venue. Still, all the criticisms of festivals don’t justify condescension towards the people who go, searching for good music and fun among friends. My generation has few other big carnivals or opportunities for collective celebration, and the festival can feel like a welcome departure from the daily grind and its social restrictions. There is real appeal in the chance to play, position, and photograph yourself with your friends on an extraordinary social terrain. The music offered at major festivals can be incredible, even if you see it from far away, and many bands use the opportunity to develop stage sets and visuals that could never fit at smaller urban venues. The chance to see more live shows in a single day than in weeks or months of concerts can be extremely satisfying — the catharsis of a year spent listening and anticipating. The big festival has grown fast because it presents artists and fans alike with a good deal, relative to their remaining options. But the contract of the corporate festival is one that fundamentally amplifies the power of capital and undermines the power of musicians and audiences in the creation of live music.

Festivals and Public Space The music festival is the special economic zone of the entertainment industry — festival companies are often provided use of public land and are routinely given special rights and tax breaks. Local governments justify special festival privileges as a necessary incentive to boost the local economy. In 2012, when a city council member for the Coachella area proposed a 6 percent local tax on tickets for 2,500+ person events (due in part to the local costs of safety and maintenance), the festival threatened to relocate as quickly as possible, and the mayor and rest of the city council swiftly lined up with the company to kill the proposal. It’s common for big festivals to be given the right to use public fairgrounds and parks — an agreement that usually runs the entire year and prevents any other music festival from using the same space. For many such festivals, these land rights — provided under the neoliberal logic that granting special privileges to a private firm will have trickle-down benefits — are the most critical asset they have. New festivals are springing up yearly in cities across the US as a local governments scramble to attract creative class residents and revenue for local businesses. Playing on local economic insecurity and our desire for spaces of collective fun, festivals advance the privatization of public spaces, the limitation of its experience to the privileged, and the restriction of creative performance to the profitable elite. A wave of rapid acquisitions has centralized the festival industry in the hands of a few large owners. Today companies like LiveNation and AEG are the dominant corporate players, and they have aggressively acquired smaller, promising festivals across the country. Once a festival proves it has a reliable market, and can make a profit for even one year, it is bought out. Increasing consolidation has even spurred outright franchising. The mega-festival Electric Daisy Carnival, which started from a single weekend outside LA, has spawned franchises across the US, UK, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Lollapalooza died as a traveling festival in 1998, but was relaunched as a stationary festival in Chicago in 2002, and has been spun off into massive festivals in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.