Can festivals bounce back?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2022
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The global events industry was valued at more than $1.1 billion in 2019, before the start of the covid-19 pandemic. Live music and concert events alone lost $30 billion in 2020 and most outdoor festivals were cancelled. This year, in 2022, with more people vaccinated around the world, many festivals have managed to return but are having to cope with rising prices and staff shortages, as well as people with less cash to spend.
Monica Newton, the CEO of the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, tells us about the challenges she's faced in holding this year's event. The director of the Great British Food Festival in the UK, Daniel Maycock, says they've managed to avoid putting up ticket prices so far and are trying to support smaller businesses.
Lisa Louis travels to the Rock en Seine festival, to the west of the French capital Paris to speak to the director, Matthieu Ducos, about how he's had to adapt. She speaks to food and drinks vendors about how they're coping with rising prices and festival goers about how they're dealing with having less money in their pockets.
Presenter: Emb Hashmi Reporter: Lisa Louis Producer: Jo Critcher
(Image: Matthieu Ducos, director of the Rock en Seine festival, Parc de Saint-Cloud; Credit: BBC)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm M Hashmi and welcome to Business Daily on the BBC. |
| 0:08.4 | Today we're looking at how festivals around the world are fighting to survive post-pandemic |
| 0:13.6 | as the cost of living begins to bite. |
| 0:17.0 | The price of the artist is 20% more and the production costs also are really higher 15% something like this. |
| 0:25.3 | We speak to festival organisers from South Africa, the UK and France to find out what challenges |
| 0:30.9 | they're facing and how they're adapting to stay afloat. |
| 0:34.2 | This is Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:38.9 | The global events industry was valued at more than 1.1 billion US dollars in 2019 |
| 0:46.0 | before the start of the pandemic. But live music and concert events alone lost $30 billion in 2020 and most outdoor festivals were cancelled. |
| 0:58.4 | But this year in 2022, with more people vaccinated around the world, many festivals have managed |
| 1:05.1 | to return. I'm getting to meet some of the organisers. First, let's go to South Africa and the National Arts |
| 1:12.4 | Festival, which is held in Mahanda in the East Cape Province. The festival is a place of gathering, |
| 1:22.8 | it's a place of inspiration. In many cases, it launches the careers of artists. So in that respect, it really |
| 1:29.7 | does occupy a very special space in the African festival landscape, but of course also the |
| 1:36.5 | international landscape. That's the CEO of the National Arts Festival, Monica Newton. I asked her how |
| 1:43.2 | it had gone this year. 2020 for the National Arts Festival was Monica Newton. I asked her how it had gone this year. |
| 1:45.0 | 2020 for the National Arts Festival was a really complicated and interesting year. |
| 1:51.0 | We planned our festival in the context of 50% capacity restrictions, outdoor crowd restrictions, |
| 1:59.0 | mask mandates, and of course that affected the venues that we selected, |
| 2:04.2 | how we programmed, where we programmed, the kinds of programming. |
| 2:09.5 | And then just the eve of the festival, our president, Sir Romoposa, announced that those |
| 2:15.5 | restrictions were dropped. |
... |
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