How to survive in the pool of festivals: A guide for the right use of PR to promote music festivals

Abstract

Music festivals have been around since the ancient Egyptian times and they’ve developed into an even bigger, more popular thing in the recent history. Beside all the already existing festivals around Europe, there are new ones being created all around the continent year after year as well. This arises the question, how those can survive in the pool of already existing festivals. I wanted my research to mainly focus on Ireland and Germany in comparison, but since it’s becoming more and more popular to travel for festivals and since some events are also famous beyond the border of their home country, I decided to include a few other countries as well. In order to answer the question I was conducting a content analysis with articles about ten different festivals in 20 different newspapers around Germany, Ireland, England and the US. The timeframe included 2010 to 2016 and I looked at both successful and failing events. On top of that, I conducted six interviews with journalists, both German and Irish, and two interviews with festival organisers, one Irish and one Suisse. The whole research showed, that there’s not much difference in the basis of festival promotion within Europe, it only depends on its size and at times on the size of the country. It became clear as well, that branding should be the first step when establishing a new music festival. The research also showed that the line‐up will probably always be the most important factor and that even bigger festivals can get negative comments about their choice of headliners. On top of that, it is important to be different and not copy other festivals in what they’re doing in order to get attention from journalists and the public.