Two years of Glasto-goers – Backed by Kogenta
Glastonbury is a world-renowned annual music and arts festival held here in the United Kingdom, attracting thousands of attendees from around the globe. It features a diverse mix of live performances from top-tier musicians, colourful artistic displays, and a vibrant camping culture, making it a celebrated cultural event and one of the largest festivals of its kind worldwide.
Glasto-goers are famed nationally for being an eclectic bunch of festival lovers, bringing in elderly ravers, infant revellers, yurt-dwelling yummy mummies and, of course, the music snobs nodding along in the indie music tents. Using our funky fresh data, we can have a detailed look at the two most recent years of Glastonbury lovers, well – the lucky few that actually managed to get tickets!
This graphic shows the spread of Glasto goers in the regions geographically closest to the festival itself – the pink indicates areas with higher volume in 2022, and the blue from 2023
Here, we used our unique Kogenta Contextual Indices (we’ve fondly called them KCIs) to bring the vivid tapestry of these Glasto-goers alive, allowing us to understand the demographics of people who visited the festival in each year.
Despite the headliners in 2022 being teen queen Olivia Rodrigo and Glasto’s youngest ever headliner, American pop princess Billie Eilish, the demographic breakdown tells us a different story. 2022 sees a significant over indexing for those age groups over 55. Based off of the set list, it would’ve been fair to first anticipate the very opposite when first looking at the data! In 2023, Glastonbury hosted significantly more nostalgic artists, Guns N Roses, Blondie and was even honoured by Elton John’s final farewell to live performance. Your classic Mum and Dad music. Similarly, we saw the converse in those attending. The age groups for 25-29 and 18-19, significantly increased – by 5% and 2.5% respectively – compared to 2022. Are these younger Glasto fans just a fan of unironically listening to their parents’ vinyls or is there a different reason behind these unexpected stats?
In actuality, it’s likely these younger 2023 ticket holders were actually inspired by the 2022 line up and bought tickets in advance of the announcement of the artists attending. In fact, the first batch of Glasto tickets that went out months before there were even whispers of the line up sold out in under 19 minutes. It speaks mostly to the unfailing calibre of the festival and the artists it is able to recruit for Glastonbury and the faith people consistently have when buying a ticket that the line up will meet their expectations. Using this same model, we would predict that next year’s attendance generally hit the older age brackets based on the year’s just gone lineup of the all-star golden oldies – but who can be sure?
In both years, people of all social classes attend. Unsurprisingly, given a general admission ticket will set you back at least 340 quid, the social class that is most able to snap up those tickets, and over indexes by 30%, is the Social Grade AB. Whilst the average household income of these same ticket holders is at least a staggering 25% above the national average. It’s the weekend for these music-lovers almost as expensive as one week’s rent of their flats in Brixton.
Looking at all this data, it’s clear that what we can say about Glastonbury is that it’s pretty age-less and gender-less in its appeal. The qualifiers to be able to attend seem to be a spell of annual leave as well as a large amount of spare change – as well as a love for good music, of course. Festival goers evidently know that the organisers will continually secure billboard topping, show stopping, beat dropping headline acts – even despite the recent articles revealing that a lot of these headline acts are surprisingly paid much less than at other big name festivals. For attendees and artists alike, Glasto has become a power that everyone wants to be attached to; a brand name anyone who is anyone wants to buy.
