Why are our festivals so crap compared to rest of europe

Would be delighted if an Irish festival had the quality or diversity of that lineup. If you compare it to Electric Picnic or Longitude 2024 there's no comparison, maybe it was just a bad year but the more I look back on it the worse it gets, I think on that lineup there's about 20 international acts I'd happily go and see, vs maybe 7/8 who were at the last picnic (plus a bunch of lesser known Irish acts). I think one of the biggest issues with festivals here is diversity, they're too geared to either mediocre Pop, middle of the road indie, whatever is trendy from Tik Tok or generic male singer songwriters throwing in a small few decent acts here or there, they really strike me as a "this is what the young people listen to" lineups without having a clue what a lot of people do actually enjoy. There's very little that strikes me as exciting, taking some of the worst acts off R&L lineup. Seeing the crowd and the energy at Nas last year at EP would show there is huge demand for other genres, as with other festival performances throughout the years. Going back 5-10 years ago to Picnic, Longitude, FF it was a different landscape quality and diversity wise.

Body and Soul became all Body and no Soul over the years

I missed all of the ealry EP's too due to age the first one I went to was 2018 and Saturday FF 2017 (which had Aphex Twin, Moderat, Peggy Gou, Mura Masa, Nicholas Jaar), different landscape/ capacity back then but lineups are night and day worse while double the size. None of them said acts you mentioned while quality would be ones of major interest personally but there is an abundance of decent acts that they just don't book apart from the odd one or two because they're hip hop, metal/rock, hard electronic, experimental orientated that would have a huge audiance for people my age who don't command huge (in the grand scheme of things) booking fees but are probably seen as too much of a risk to book when it sells out every year with a medicore lineup at best, best to stick safe and boring. I don't expect it to ever be like its hey-day but would be nice to have one somewhat consistent decent festival here to really look forward to.

I saw Future Islands at EP. Their one tune got a decent response. Slowdive, hints in the name folks. Mitski. Mehski.

I don't really accept arguments about logistics/ weather/ being a small island off Europe for the festival situation here.

Case in point: Iceland Airwaves. A 3 day festival pass is ISK14900/ €101, in a country that is more remote and more expensive in general than here.

I was there in 2022, saw Amyl and the Sniffers, Thumper and some top Nordic groups. Indoor venues, so not directly comparable, but EP is what, €300 now, for a mystery lineup? I'd sooner spend the money on a plane ticket to a festival abroad.

Some good points in the thread. Another thing is that live music has changed beyond recognition. Over the last couple of decades, the lack of large scale support by the music industry for quality new music, is really showing in recent times. Most big gigs now are basically legacy acts. Take Duran Duran for example. I remember back in 1999, they played a gig in The Olympia. By then they were deemed to be well past their sell by date. Yet 26 years after that, they're going to be playing a big gig in Malahide Castle this summer.

There's still great music out there, but a lot of acts that might well have been on big stages, had they been around in the 90s, nowadays wouldn't be playing venues bigger than Whelans.

There's actually a lot of great Irish music around at the moment. I think Irish music is a lot more exciting now than it was 20 years ago. Yet, most of them don't get much support here and end up heading off to the UK, or just staying here and doing it part time. Much of the media here let PR companies lead them into supporting awful crap like The Coronas. So you don't see a lot of these bands play the likes of EP. When I see rubbish like Kodaline playing at EP, I just cringe. That's like Westlife playing EP back in 2005.

I dont see why people buy a ticket for electric picnic before seeing a lineup.

The other thing is, the weather- Been hungover at a festival and it pissing rain is beyond misreable.

Go to one in Europe

Weather,and costs ,

Desirabilty comes into it too , acts want to play Glastonbury, and they've firmly put themselves into a festival calendar -

That doesn't really apply to EP though any more. For Glastonbury, you know you're going to get good value along the way, because there are so many decent bands playing there. EP hasn't been like that for a fair amount of years now. EP has built up the FOMO reputation now in terms of tickets - people purchasing them in fear of missing out. But in reality, I'd say there will be plenty of people trying to offload their tickets later in the year. If the tickets for EP were just on general sale without the "sold-out" hype (like other festivals in Ireland do), I don't think it would come close to selling out. It's not great when some of the highlights of EP in recent years are Wolfe Tones and Saw Doctors.

if your posting in the gigs thread electric picnic doesn’t want, need your money. It doesn’t even want to go to effort of trying to placate you. It has a found a larger broader audience offering a different type of festival experience and it’s generating a million plus profit every year doing that we’re previously it was losing money or barely scraping a meagre profit.
plenty of other festival out there for a discerning music fan

Just an example as could be seen on social media, "fans" complaining they couldn't get tickets when they know 2 or 3 songs.

You're not getting my point, I meant there were people early 20's raging that they didn't get tickets.

Always an argument, never just an easy, "ah ye I get you".