Over a third of the UK have attended a festival since 2016

Dive inside Ticketmaster’s annual State of Play research series, which this year revisits festivals…

Every year, we here at Ticketmaster explore a specific area of live entertainment, surveying fans to find out more about what they love, what they dislike, and just what makes the live experience one of the biggest endorphin-releasers on the planet.

With festivals an ever-present staple in the entertainment calendar, we’ve delved back into green fields, seas of tents, and huge line-ups to find out what makes festival-goers tick.

We’ve surveyed over 4,000 festival punters across the UK, and drawn on ten years of ticketing data, so you can delve deep into the mind of the festival fan. Explore below to find out what attracts fans to festivals, the growing importance of sustainability and gender diversity, and just how many fans hook up at festivals without going anywhere near a shower.

Here’s State of Play: Festivals 2019.

Header photo by Matt Eachus/Leeds Festival

Ticketmaster partnered with Kantar to get a representative sample of the UK population, through an online survey that was fielded in April 2019. Following a thorough cleansing and weighting process, a total of 10901 responses qualified as complete and representative responses. 3987 of them passed our screener (having attended at least one music festival since 2016) and were defined as festival attendees therefore informing the majority of our report.

Included are some trends from Ticketmaster’s database of over 3 million customers who purchased at least one festival ticket from 2009 to 2018.