Features
Glastonbury’s Back
The UK’s Glastonbury Festival returned to the summer calendar by selling out in a record time of just one hour and 40 minutes, coinciding with figures showing that its dairy farmer owner appears to have added a cash cow to his herd.
After taking a year off to avoid a clash with this year’s London Olympics, the 2013 edition of Michael Eavis’ famous festival has sold 135,000 tickets without naming any of the acts on the bill.
The annual media sport of speculating on who might headline has so far thrown up U2 and The Rolling Stones. Eavis himself has already been bullish about the 2013 festival being up there with the best of them. He started the event in 1970.
The newly published accounts for Glastonbury Festival 2011 Ltd. show revenues of £32.2 million ($51.5 million), about 5.2 percent up on what it had brought in a year earlier, as reported by The Independent.
Although the festival snubs commercial sponsorship and several European festivals are having to tough out a recession, Glastonbury’s revenues – which were $37.8 million in 2008 – have increased 36 percent in the last five years.
Gross profit for 2011 came in at $36 million, marginally more than the $34.7 million achieved in 2010.
The festival’s pre-tax profit did tumble a little, falling by around 30 percent from $4.16 million to $2.88 million. Much of the proceeds from Glastonbury are shared among the charities it supports, particularly Oxfam, Greenpeace and Water Aid.
The figures also show the highest paid director received a salary of $96,000.
Eavis, who normally has more than 400 head of dairy cattle on the Worthy Farm site, also receives £500,000 for renting it to compensate for “loss of earnings.”
The sheer size of the festival in terms of infrastructure, the numbers of performers, crew and paying festivalgoers staying in tents, caravans and motor homes means the animals have to be brought indoors.