Reading / Leeds Festival & Vodafone

Next year’s Reading and Leeds festivals will go on general sale on December 3rd 2010. Now this is a whole lot earlier than the usual March / April dates for general sale. But the real twist is the way the tickets will be released, and the channels for purchasing them.

Customers of Vodafone will effectively have ‘first dibs’ on purchasing tickets, as they go on an exclusive pre-sale on December 1st 2010. Vodafone were one of the principle sponsors of the festivals this year, but have seemingly ramped-up their efforts to get involved in the cash-cow that Reading and Leeds have become.

Taken from the Virtual Festivals website (click here for full story):

"Festival Republic is set to offer customers exclusive ticket pre-sales through Vodafone for all of their 2011 events.

Vodafone VIP will enable its subscribers to buy Reading, Leeds, Latitude and The Big Chill tickets on Wednesday 1 December, 48 hours before they go on general sale on Friday 3 December."

Thankfully I already have my ticket (my decision to purchase during September’s pre-sale even when I didn’t have money for food has now been fully justified) but I feel a bit disappointed by Festival Republic’s decision to distribute tickets in this way. In my opinion it won’t help the issue of touting, but would rather help those touts who purchase as many tickets as humanely possible on credit cards and put on eBay for inflated prices.

It seems more and more that mobile phone companies are muscling in on the live music scene – Virgin Mobile sponsor the V Festival, and O2 now has exclusive branding rights on the AMG (Academy Music Group) venues in the UK, as well as the O2 Arena in London. O2’s ‘Priority’ service allows their customers 48 hours exclusivity on gig tickets for events within their venues, often at the same time as the ‘fan pre-sales’ set up on the email mailing lists of the artists playing the gigs.

Also worth considering is the issue of ticket websites such as See Tickets, Gigs and Tours, Ticketmaster, Ticketweb, and “re-sale” agency Viagogo. Many people have been left disappointed by having to repeatedly hammer F5 (refresh on browsers) and repeatedly dial on the days when tickets go on sale. Surely all the extra money that customers pay on top of the ‘face value’ of tickets (are extortionate booking fees really necessary?) should be better spent on providing websites that don’t buckle when put under even the slightest duress.

I don’t really want to hark on about Reading and Leeds “selling out” because that’s not really new to anybody who’s either been, or knows a little about the 'state of play' in the UK live music scene. But I worry that the festivals are only a few steps (and a decent chunk of sponsorship deal) from being re-branded as the Vodafone Festival: Reading and Leeds – which is something I remember the organisers being keen to step away from when the long-term sponsorship deal with Carling ended in 2007.

I suppose I should point out that anybody interested in getting a ticket from Vodafone on December 1st should head to the Vodafone VIP website.

Anyway, I hope that this had made you (the reader) more aware of what’s going on, and any comments would be very gratefully received – my university dissertation is about the culture and culture change of music festivals in the UK – and any opinions you have would be really useful primary research to discuss as audience perceptions. So to conclude, some questions:

Will you try and get tickets to Reading / Leeds next month? How will today’s news affect you?
Should ticket sellers (Ticketmaster etc) spend more money on their website’s reliability?
Is the trend of mobile phone providers within live music a good thing?

Let me know,

Paul