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Vice Blog

Crystal Ball - Five Future Festival Trends

When our ancestors attempted to tear down the walls of the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970, it was because the hippies encamped outside the Afton Down site's perimeter wanted the festival to be free. They saw themselves as the vanguard of what was to come. They genuinely believed it inevitable that society would move towards their anticapitalist, peace'n'love way of thinking. Of course, if, instead of taking to the stage to shout them down, promoter Rikki Farr had simply opened up a portal in spacetime to V2009, he could have ended that particular philosophical argument then and there. That's the problem with predicting the future—it's always a feeble-minded extrapolation of present trends. Apart from these predictions, of course. This list contains five cast-iron future-facts. In a few years, all festivals will be like this. Trust us.

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INTERNAL BRANDING
Everyone will have to be branded from tit to tail. Now that the banking sector has failed, the industry based around enhancing our awareness of products is the only thing keeping our economy going. You've all seen the Lynx "manwash" stands touted around the big festivals, right? Well, "experiential marketing" is going to have to go one better to hold our attention. In the future, as you sup lager in a tent, you'll think nothing of a colonologist rectally inserting an endoscope to perform an experiential cancer scan sponsored by McDonald's, which will project the internalities of your lower bowel onto a big screen sponsored by Samsung, while a bunch of Essex boys laugh and jeer at what you had for dinner on Thursday.

EXTREME BOUTIQUES
Like everything else in society, it's the middle that'll get squeezed. Big, all-in fests like Glastonbury and Reading will expand until they carpet entire counties. But at the other end of the scale, the small festivals will become more and more "boutique," exclusive, and tailored until the point where it's basically just you eyeballing Grace Jones one on one. At Gracefest 2017, you and Grace will spend a weekend alone together in a yurt in Cambridgeshire. On the third day, Grace will turn up two hours late and grind her way through "Slave to the Rhythm" while you eat an organic pork pie that costs £75.

KIDS' ROCK
As festivals become increasingly family friendly, there will come a point during Latitude 2021 where Jarvis realizes that he's getting a better response by reading scenes from The Gruffalo to the traditional mainstage crowd of 50,000 bawling nips than when he's plowing through his ironic art-rock, and so the first Kidstival is spontaneously born. It's not all bad news, though--the festival will be able to slash ticket costs by applying for status as a government-sponsored Sure Start Children's Center, and there will be no need to get a babysitter if you have kids of your own, since the whole festival will essentially be a gigantic crèche.

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PAID PAPPING
Continuing the trend for paps following Lily and Kate around sodden fields, smaller festivals will attempt to get the same sort of easy PR by employing their own celebrity attendees to turn up and be papped. The celebs concerned will differ depending on the budget of the festival in question. Glasto could probably afford a trio of main stage-size attractions of the LiLo, SamRon, RPatz variety, while more cash-challenged events will have to settle for Kerry Katona and a reject from Popstars: The Rivals. This process will reach a nadir when Jack Tweed is snapped harassing girls at Bedford Calling 2015.

REUNION ROTATION
As the world finally runs out of recently reunited headliners (shortly before it runs out of oil in 2023), the festival of the future will be forced to run on a rotational basis: bands doing their farewell tours will do their reunion tours the next year. Bands reforming will be obliged to break up the next year and so on and so on ad infinitum forevermore. The Isle of Wight 2021 line-up will inevitably feature, band for band, the exact same line-up as the original edition in 1969, with Ronnie Wood playing in the place of any deceased band members.

WORDS BY GAVIN HAYNES
ILLUSTRATIONS BY DANIEL DAVID FREEMAN