During the "May Day" holiday, more than 40% of users chose music festivals as the first choice for vacation and leisure, of which 60% chose to watch performances across the city
A "two-way rush" between the audience and rock culture
Dazhong Daily reporter Xu Chen
In 2000, Beijing Midi Music School founded the "Midi Music Festival", which is the first test of the art form of music festival in China. In recent years, music festivals that were originally of a somewhat professional nature have "flourished and flourished". In 2007, there were only 24 music festivals in the domestic market, and in 2018, this number became 263, and in 11 years, the number of music festivals held in China every year increased by more than ten times.
In the summer when the heat is lingering, the music festival is even more "dry" out of a fanatical atmosphere. Damai data shows that in 2021, during the "May Day" holiday, a total of 56 music festivals were held across the country, an increase of 37% over the same period in 2019, and the box office and the number of people watching the show increased by 252% and 173% respectively year-on-year. Originally a music festival with the theme of rock music, a niche culture, it has become a mass entertainment project that everyone is rushing to.
"Only once did music save the world"
In detail, the music festival is still a relatively "ancient" art form. As early as the 18th century, music festivals were born in Britain. However, at that time, the music festival was limited to watching live performances, and did not have the scale of hundreds of thousands of people in large-scale music festivals today.
In the history of the festival, the Woodstock Music Festival is an inflection point. On August 15, 1969, 450,000 hippies gathered from different cities to the small town of Bethel in southeastern New York State, and the otherwise quiet and comfortable rural town was caught off guard.
"There's only one time music has saved the world, and that's Woodstock." The american scholar Maurice Dixstein wrote in his book "The Gate of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties" that studied American culture in the 1960s, which shows the prominence of the Woodstock Festival.
At that time, American society was at a time when contradictions were acute and prominent, human rights and racial issues were emerging in an endless stream, and people had never been so eager to express their pursuit and yearning for freedom and equality. However, mainstream channels cannot speak on their behalf, people's expression of demands has been greatly suppressed, crowds are indignant, and protests and other acts of resistance have been staged one after another everywhere.
In addition to these avenues of confrontation and rebellion, is there a way to both avoid conflict and express demands? In 1969, two 24-year-old hippies came to thought after a successful musical ceremony. They believe that music is the way to unite everything, the channel that can best convey the idea of "love and peace", and the extreme but non-violent rock music is the perfect "pressure relief valve" for people to vent their emotions. So the two hippies found investors and held a music festival, the famous Woodstock Music Festival.
It was the right time to create this "Save the World" music festival. The festival, which was expected to have only 50,000 people participating, attracted 450,000 spectators from all over the world. The town's roads, which were rarely seen with vehicles, were filled with cars with restless heartbeats and turned into crowded open-air parking lots. For 3 days, people were immersed in the sound of rock and roll, unmanaged mega-parties, and no crimes occurred, which was extremely rare in the United States at that time.
The Woodstock Music Festival brings the utopia of "love and peace" to the world, and the theme of "Three Days of Peace and Music" highlights people's ultimate yearning for peace, freedom, equality and love, and is also considered to be the core of the spirit of "Woodstock". Forty years later, the famous director Ang Lee also made the carnival into a movie, "Making Woodstock Music Festival".
Today, with the evolution of the background of the times and the transmutation of cultural consumption concepts, some elements of the "Woodstock Spirit" have quietly retreated from the explicit spirit of the music festival, but the spiritual core of expressing the pursuit of freedom can still explode the hot atmosphere at the music festival. On this basis, attribute labels such as entertainment and carnival have also established an increasingly close connection with music festivals.
Audiences and rock culture go in both directions
Some people say that the people at the music festival are "crazy". On the sidelines, you may dismiss such an evaluation, but when you are really on the scene, you will find that the evaluation has its own appropriateness - the ritual activities of the music festival are full of collisions and sensory stimulation.
At noon in the summer, under the scorching sun, the grass is unexpectedly hot, and the high temperature lingers around everyone on the scene for a long time, under such a battle, there are many people who are not afraid to rush in front of the stage, and there are not a few who hide in the shadows.
At dusk, as the sun sets and the light dims, people who were scattered everywhere begin to gather in large areas to the front of the stage, and the rituals exclusive to rock culture are about to be staged.
People in front of the stage raise their arms to the strong rhythm of the music, jumping up and down like springs, which is "Pogo".
The people of "Pogo" formed a dense and solid "human wall" around the stage. But free music festivals don't allow obstacles, and "driving the train" is a powerful way for them to break the barriers: led by a certain fan, many people in the back put their hands on the shoulders in front of them in a queue, line up one after another like train cars, and then keep moving offstage, driving to the front of the stage. Whenever this time comes, the "human wall" in front of the stage will crack a passage, some people choose to take the initiative to avoid, and some people will face the difficulties instead, just to enjoy the surging feeling brought by the collision.
The ultimate in collision thrill is "Mosh". In the central area near the stage, participants occupy a "Mosh zone" where participants push each other with their hands or hit each other's bodies. Mosh is a hormonal, free, highly varied and physically engaging dance movement that can be performed by as few as a dozen people or as many as a few thousand at the same time.
Whether it is from the perspective of the atmosphere of the scene or the larger cultural background, the music festival has achieved a great integration of fans.
This is first related to the fact that rock music has entered the public eye. Due to its specific cultural background and rebellious style, rock culture has always been classified as a "subculture" as opposed to mainstream culture. With the popularity of niche cultural variety shows such as "Summer of the Band" and "China Has Hip Hop", niche music cultures such as rock and rap full of personality have extended their tentacles to a wider group, and more and more people are willing to feel the charm. As one of the main fronts of rock music open to the public, the popularity of the music festival has also increased.
In addition to the active proximity of the audience, the festival itself also has the tension to include more groups participating in it. On the one hand, the "threshold" for participation in music festivals is lower compared to other "subcultural" events. At the scene of the music festival, there are not a few people participating in "Pogo" and "Mosh", which reflects another important driving force for the festival to "go out of the circle" - the ceremony of breaking the restrictions. Taking "Pogo" as an example, the narrow sense of "Pogo" is mainly used for punk performance scenes, with its own action norms, but as the audience of the festival carnival continues to expand, continuing to set limits on various ceremonies is not only anachronistic but also contrary to the "unworldly" rock spirit. As a result, the restrictions of the festival's rituals are fading and becoming easily accessible to everyone. On the other hand, the content of the music festival is expanding from rock and roll to more diversified music types such as folk songs and electronic music; not only that, the music festival has gradually evolved from a music party to a carnival party that integrates performing arts, tourism, catering and other items, and the happiness of individuals is truly satisfied, which is precisely the entertainment ecological model that contemporary young people yearn for.
Stressful work and cookie-cutter daily life, today's young people are blind to exciting, cathartic forms of entertainment. The music festival is such an opportunity, people can jump freely when the music reaches its climax, screaming under the cover of noisy music, and no one will pay attention to the above behavior with strange eyes. Xiao Ke (pseudonym) is an ordinary white-collar worker, not long ago, she did not like rock music, she quickly entered the state the first time she went to the music festival scene, "Pogo" all day. "Even though I was weak and tired the next day, I loved that feeling so much that I'm going to go next time." Xiao Ke said endlessly.
It can be said that it is the "two-way rush" between the audience and rock culture that has promoted the transformation of the music festival from a niche gathering to a mass carnival. The data shows that in the 2021 "May Day" holiday, more than 40% of users choose music festivals as the first choice for vacation and leisure, of which 60% of users choose to watch performances across the city.
Hidden concern: Less than 20% of the festival is profitable
At present, the type and number of music festivals in China still show a "blowout" growth trend. According to data from the Music and Entertainment Industry Research Institute, from 2016 to 2019, more than 200 outdoor music festivals were held across the country every year.
The growing popularity of music festivals is attracting capital from all walks of life. The flow of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people has gradually highlighted the driving effect of music festivals on local cultural tourism, and successfully holding a music festival has become one of the effective ways to create a city business card. As a major province of culture and tourism, Shandong has also become a major music festival this year: according to incomplete statistics, In the second half of this year, Shandong is expected to hold 14 music festivals, including Jinan, Qingdao, Zibo, Weifang, Dongying, Rizhao, Dezhou and other cities.
However, "some people rush to the field at night, some people resign and return to their hometowns", in the case of the rapid growth of the music festival market, there are also a large number of music festival brands that have disappeared or stopped: although the public's participation in music festivals has increased significantly in recent years, there are still many music festivals that still lose money. Some insiders pointed out that in China, less than 20% of the music festival is profitable, and the rest are "losing money and making money". Therefore, there are still only a few music festival brands in China, such as strawberries and midi, which can be held stably for a long time. According to statistics, music festivals that landed in 2016, 2017 and 2018 and have a certain brand accounted for only about 15% of the overall market.
The reason for this should be the result of a high degree of homogeneous competition in the products of the festival. Music festivals are essentially a cultural product, and in the context of the proliferation of homogeneous products, if you want to break through, you must focus on the content. Starting with music and not just music – nowadays, people's demand for music festivals tends to be diverse and high-quality, so meeting the diverse needs of the audience will be one of the effective ways for music festivals to expand their audiences. In the long run, the vertical segmentation of content will be the general trend of consumption upgrading, and the identification of the target audience and its core needs is a long-term investment in creating high-quality cultural products. In terms of content, domestic head music festival brands have their own strategies: in terms of performance lineup, music festivals such as midi and yolo focus more on vertical deep ploughing in specific styles, while the music styles of festivals such as strawberries and wheat fields are relatively more diverse and rich.
In addition to content, infrastructure services are also a short board for music festivals to make up. The scale of tens of thousands of people is commonplace for music festivals now, but the on-site security, public toilets, cleaning and other supporting services of many music festivals are difficult to carry the corresponding workload, so that many music festivals can hear a lot of spit on the Internet after many music festivals. During the "May Day" period this year, the Nanjing Strawberry Music Festival and the Henan Yuntaishan Music Festival were reported to be full of garbage after the dispersal, which reflected that the music festival still lacked supporting facilities. In terms of garbage disposal, Japan's Fuji Rock Festival has performed well: in addition to the giant environmental bags distributed at the entrance, the location of the garbage bins at the site is also quite eye-catching, and there are volunteers around to sort and supervise the garbage droprs. The level of facilities and services that cannot keep up is a common shortcoming of music festivals, which not only affects the audience experience, but also affects the image of the city where the festival is held. To solve this problem, we cannot rely solely on the audience's self-awareness, but also require the organizers to continuously optimize the supporting design.
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