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I never want to go to a festival again, but UK music would be lost without them | Barbara Ellen

Glastonbury may be doing OK but smaller grassroots events are going under. That’s bad news for our cultural ecosystem

This is the British music industry at its larval stage – where new artists emerge, and all the crew who put on the show What, I used to ponder, was the point of these gig-themed mega-malls. There’s not enough space here to go into the myriad reasons festivals are struggling: put simplistically, a gory mix of Brexit, rising costs, skint punters, changing audience tastes, artist-related issues and the aftershocks of the pandemic. Complacency (lazily gesturing at successful market leaders) isn’t the answer: Glastonbury can’t carry the entire music festival circuit alone.

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