Introduction
It has generally been acknowledged that the music festival market in UK is remarkable in its size and breadth, with over 600 events held each year (Anderton, C). Meanwhile, the overall commercialization of these UK music festivals in resent years is considerable. Finkel (2010, p. 237) argues that the “degree to which an arts festival is commercialized depends not only on the activities conducted by the festival, but also the ways in which the festival is constructed and utilized by its financial supporters”.
According to marketing analysis by IEG and Mintel, least’s figures show that brands spent £23m on live music sponsorship in 2008(IEG, 2010). In fact, only a few festivals can maintain a long term and sustainable development, statistic shows that 160 new events established since 2003, and four years later, the figure reduced by 25%(Anderton, 2008). One of the main reasons behind this reduction may attribute to withdrawal of sponsorship support.
This essay discusses sponsorship of music festival by analyzing the advantage and disadvantage of sponsorship at music Festival. By exploring these aspects, this essay presents a case study of Glastonbury Festival, which has a 145 years history, and now Glastonbury Festival is one of the largest greenfield festival in the world, attracting more than 150,000 festival goers over 3 or 4 days each year who’s Sponsors range from drinks to 4G network. Due to the fact that music festivals do not receive any public funding, so sponsorship deals are an essential element for music festival. (Getz, 2002 cited in Rowley and Williams, 2008). So it is valuable to explore the sponsorships of Glastonbury festival. The second section of this essay will focus on the literature review and the following section will be the case study of Glastonbury Festival and the final part is the conclusion.
Literature Review
Kolb (2005) claims that sponsorship is types of financial to in-kind operational supports...