Anderton - Music festivals in the UK: beyond the carnivalesque

Music Festivals in the UK

The outdoor music festival market has developed and commercialised significantly since the mid-1990s and is now a mainstream part of the British summertime leisure experience. The overall number of outdoor music festivals staged in the UK doubled between 2005 and 2011 to reach a peak of over 500 events. UK Music (2016) estimates that the sector attracts over 3.7 million attendances each year, and that music tourism as a whole sustains nearly 40,000 full time jobs. Music Festivals in the UK is the first extended investigation into this commercialised rock and pop festival sector and examines events of all sizes: from mega-events such as Glastonbury Festival, V Festival and the Reading and Leeds Festivals to boutique events with maximum attendances as small as 250. In the past, research into festivals has typically focused either on their carnivalesque heritage or on developing managerial tools for the field of Events Management. Anderton moves beyond such perspectives to propose new ways of understanding and theorising the cultural, social and geographic importance of outdoor music festivals. He argues that changes in the sector since the mid-1990s such as professionalisation, corporatisation, mediatisation, regulatory control, and sponsorship/branding should not necessarily be regarded as a process of transgressive alternative culture being co-opted by commercial concerns; instead, such changes represent a reconfiguration of the sector in line with changes in society, and a broadening of the forms and meanings that may be associated with outdoor music events.

Chris Anderton is an Associate Professor at Solent University, UK, where he teaches music management, business, history and culture. He is co-author of the book Understanding the Music Industries (Sage, 2013) and has published book chapters and articles on music bootlegging, music blogs, progressive rock, and music festivals. He established the in-house music organisation Solent Music (solentmusic.com) in 2011 and is co-Executive Producer of the annual Solent SMILE Festival (smilefest.co.uk). His research interests include the cultural economy of music festivals and live events, the future of the music industries, and the hidden histories of popular, underground and niche music genres.

Series Editors :
Stan Hawkins, Professor of Popular Musicology, University of Oslo and Lori Burns, Professor, University of Ottawa, Canada

Popular musicology embraces the field of musicological study that engages with popular forms of music, especially music associated with commerce, entertainment and leisure activities. The Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series aims to present the best research in this field. Authors are concerned with criticism and analysis of the music itself, as well as locating musical practices, values and meanings in cultural context. The focus of the series is on popular music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a remit to encompass the entirety of the worlds popular music.

Critical and analytical tools employed in the study of popular music are being continually developed and refined in the twenty-first century. Perspectives on the transcultural and intercultural uses of popular music have enriched understanding of social context, reception and subject position. Popular genres as distinct as reggae, township, bhangra, and flamenco are features of a shrinking, transnational world. The series recognizes and addresses the emergence of mixed genres and new global fusions, and utilizes a wide range of theoretical models drawn from anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, media studies, semiotics, postcolonial studies, feminism, gender studies and queer studies.

Other titles in the series:

Popular Music, Cultural Politics and Music Education in China
Wai-Chung Ho

Perspectives on German Popular Music
Edited by Michael Ahlers, Christoph Jacke

Music and Irish Identity: Celtic Tiger Blues
Gerry Smyth

Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Edited by Florian Heesch, Niall Scott

The Songs of Joni Mitchell: Gender, Performance and Agency
Anne Karppinen

The Singer-Songwriter in Europe: Paradigms, Politics and Place
Edited by Isabelle Marc, Stuart Green

When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines, 19452010
Jon Stratton

The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of the Beatles: Liverpool and Popular Music Heritage Tourism
Michael Brocken

Beyond the Carnivalesque

Chris Anderton

First published 2019
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2018 Chris Anderton

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ISBN: 978-1-4724-3620-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-59679-2 (ebk)

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For Meriel, Amy and Sean