by Not for the first time, Taylor Swift sent her fans into a frenzy. It was last June and the world’s biggest pop star had just announced the European dates of her massive Eras tour, leaving an obvious Glastonbury-sized hole in the schedule.
Swift – who had originally agreed to headline the Pyramid stage in 2020 before the pandemic intervened – was expected to take her belated bow at Worthy Farm. Glastonbury organizer Emily Eavis said in 2022 “I think we’ll have Taylor on board next time she’s on tour”.
But after weeks of hope came the hammer blow. Instead, for each of the three nights of the festival Swift, 34, will be playing at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium while on tour. Glastonbury headliners will be joined by Dua Lipa, Coldplay (for the fifth time ever) and American RnB star SZA.
Swift is unusual, as the 34-year-old’s tour is the first ever to exceed $1 billion (£790 million) in ticket sales, but the fact that she skipped Glastonbury shows an important point. The festival doesn’t pay the headliners, or other acts, for that matter, and Swift is now too big to get the honor.
Lipa is clearly a headliner: a homegrown global superstar coming into her own with a new album out. But Coldplay, even to its defenders, feels it’s a safe bet, even though SZA, despite her Grammy and Brit awards, wasn’t the first choice. Madonna, fresh off the success of her Celebration tour, was said to be on Sunday before a row of cash put an end to those talks. After last year’s three headliners in the form of Arctic Monkeys, Guns N’ Roses and Elton John, the run of headline acts at Glastonbury is under siege.
Glastonbury is a unique festival due to its lack of corporate sponsorship, commitment to donating millions of pounds to charity each year and the general coverage provided by the BBC. Last year’s festival, which saw 140,000 people descend on Worthy Farm, cost £62 million to put on and Glastonbury made a record £3.7 million in donations to good causes.
While many festivals have deep sponsors, BST in Hyde Park is sponsored by American Express, Glastonbury avoids such revenue by giving prime advertising spots to the charities Oxfam, Water Aid and Greenpeace.
The result is that Glastonbury, by its own admission, pays far less than other festivals — as little as 10 per cent of the £1 million-plus fees artists can earn. “We’re not in a position where we can give people huge sums of money,” Eavis said in 2017. “So we’re really grateful for the bonds we get, because they’re basically doing it for us. the love for him.”
When the Rolling Stones played their bravura 2013 headliner, they put a huge catwalk into the crowd so a dancing Mick Jagger could get closer to the punters and had a mechanical phoenix come to life during Sympathy for the Devil. As a result, the band spent more money staging the show than they were paid to do it. Towards that year’s festival, its founder, Sir Michael Eavis, admitted that they were not paid more than other headliners, despite the fact that he was able to command millions for other one-off shows.
“The headliner is standard bog fare. We get the headlines for a tenth of the normal price. So they are not being paid much,” he said. Sir Paul McCartney received just £200,000 for his 2022 headline slot, when he is normally paid more than £2.5 million.
So why, when other festivals and stadium tours are more profitable, do artists still play Glastonbury? Partly this is because the Glastonbury sets go on long in the memory and can define their career, along with the levels of Wimbledon coverage on the BBC. Eavis added in 2013: “Headliners are always good for us because they want to do it because they get TV and they get huge sales right after the show.”
A rival festival organizer sees it differently. “Glastonbury is a big TV show and the BBC pays for it. I regret that because I pay the license fee, so I pay for Glastonbury and they pay 10 percent of what I have to pay artists,” they say. “They pay a lot less than other festivals because of the BBC coverage.”
The Corporation is deeply concerned about the millions of pounds it spends on securing exclusive broadcasting rights for the festival, as well as the cost of sending hundreds of staff to Somerset. He has historically used exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act that protect journalism and free expression to answer questions asked by license fee payers.
For an artist like Stormzy, who headlined the Pyramid Stage in 2019 with a show that reportedly cost more to put on than any previous set, it marked the rapper’s definitive move from the grime world to the mainstream. In the weeks following Stormzy’s set, in which he wore a Banksy-designed Union Jack vest, sales of his Gang Signs and Prayer album increased by more than 300 percent and jumped up the charts from 73 to 14. That same year then Kylie Minogue, who was in the “legend” slot on Sunday afternoon, released a greatest hits album at the same time as Glastonbury. It went straight to number one.
Alan Edwards, the legendary PR svengali, writes in his new book about how, in 2000, he got David Bowie to play a set on the Pyramid stage that helped revive his iconic career. The set went down in history, with Bowie playing to 250,000 people, although the fee was paltry. “It was funny, it was about £20,000 or something and even then it wasn’t a lot of money,” says Edwards. “David has always been an artist and was driven by what he felt was right and what he wanted to do, rather than the payday. He didn’t even ask. It was the cool thing to do. Glastonbury has got that great legacy.”
Apart from Swift and Madonna from the line-up, there are signs that some artists will not put up with lower fees. Nadine Shah, who has been an outspoken supporter of fair remuneration for singers, said she turned down a place at Worthy Farm this year. “I would but I wasn’t offered a TV stage so I turned it down,” she said. “It’s too costly a blow for me to take otherwise.”
John Giddings, the agent and promoter who runs the Isle of Wight Festival, says he has discussed the (relative) lack of money available at Glastonbury with the organisers. “Michael Eavis once asked me how I booked Fleetwood Mac when he had been auditioning for them for years,” Giddings tells me. “I said, ‘Michael, I paid them’.” Interestingly, despite early speculation that she might play the Sunday evening “legend” slot at Glastonbury, this year Stevie Nicks is one of the headliners for BST.
Mick Fleetwood said in 2019 “I’ll burn in hell if we don’t [Glastonbury] one day”, but Nicks herself said this month that, following the untimely death of Christine McVie in November 2022, “there is no chance now of Fleetwood Mac getting back together in any way”.
In a way, none of this matters. Glastonbury’s £355 tickets sold out months before any acts in the line-up were confirmed, so Emily Eavis can pretty much do whatever she likes. In recent years there has been a lot of focus on promoting a new generation of performers, especially women, who have long been underrepresented as festival pioneers. Outside of the marquee gigs at this year’s festival are Fontaines DC, The Last Dinner Party and Little Simz. Each has significant slots, and is almost guaranteed to have an audience of thousands each.
“We’re doing our best so the pipeline needs to be developed,” Eavis said last year. “This really starts back with the record companies, radio. I can shout as loud as I want but we have to get everyone on board.”
