Electric Picnic 2026 **No Ticket Sales / Requests** A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies

Most of them are great too, I just wish they'd mix them up a bit rather than having some acts play multiple years running.

Becky hill was billed 3rd for her day at reading/leeds 2025 and was billed 2nd at EP 2025 for her day. Minimal difference.
also reading/Leeds and EP are never going to be exact like for like. Reading/Leeds have 5 stages/tents whereas EP has 30 or so stages/tents.
Reading/Leeds are always going to be slightly more too heavy with less stages and more capacity.

fatboy slim is headlining a lot of mid capacity festivals still. He ain’t cheap.
kodaline are/were enormously popular in Ireland. No matter how dreadful they are and lack of popularity elsewhere.

You can google the accounts of EP, it made €1.5m profit on EP 2022. With turnover in the €25M range EP is not the cash cow that you seem to think it is.
A 6% profit ratio is what EP generates. Which would be considered low to mid margin.

Yeah like EP is generally a good festival and in most years the lineup is by no means bad, but I do think they cheap out massively in areas within the lineup, like as you said Electric Arena was ropey this year, Saturday afternoon-evening in particular was atrocious it was just a stretch of Irish acts that were never big enough to warrant the respective slots even in their prime, and even if they were/are they are not great to begin with. I do think for what it is worth though the Saturday overall was probably the strongest day.

I don't think being excluded from that initial announcement necessarily rules twenty one pilots out as Friday headliner, and I agree that incidentally they seem quite likely. Could Charli not still play but on Sunday? I'm fairly sure Raye and Florence are ruled out based on the days they are playing R&L and having headlined either recently or having a big show over here already. This is somewhat far fetched, but given that you seem right about most Friday headliners in close proximity being ruled out, I wonder of we will get one further afield, The Strokes are headlining a fair few Live Nation Festivals, mostly in the states, but they arebplaying sporadic dates further afield and maybe they could do EP and then some other EU/UK dates. I'd say we could just end up being stuck with Kingfishr or Amble but yeah.

nope. Probably too genre specific to headline EP on a Friday. EP will probably have something more radio friendly like king fisher

They don't tend to care about being inspired, whether that be for better or for worse depending on the situation, but I do agree with you about them headlining after playing main stage slots being farcical, not only have Amble done three years in a row now but Kingfishr got third down on main stage, there isnt much of a kick in popularity to justify the headline a second year on.

Late announcement of Kngfshr would be sheit but predictable. Leaving the announcement of dregs like this until late on also textbook.

Yeh. Ireland a bizarre parochial little market.

edit

If you appeal to the trad crowd in Ireland you can get headliner status at the largest fest with one popular song. That CMAT isnt headlining but these chancers may be is testament to this.

Not great

Lol... Ah well, I'd say Wunderhorse will occupy me enough before whatever headliners they have primed, who knows, hopefully the headliners are good enough to the point I might stick around main to get a good spot. Do we reckon Audrey is set up for that Conan Gray spot?

Would be a no-brainer to book Bleech 9:3 for this year, not been booked for any other Irish festivals (doing loads in the UK) and will be a huge draw by the time EP rolls around

They are in portugal the same weekend so maybe.

I reckon they'll be booked.

Not sure what you mean?

another Irish promoter was teasing that they are doing shows for that band soon.
So it means they are effectively ruled out for EP