You don´t need to be a big music fan to realize that music festivals are happening. Every year, every Summer, music festivals are around and with many brands becoming part of the events they are getting more air time and publicity, so you don´t need to check music news or specialized websites to know where, when and who is playing on that festival near you (or not so much). I remember reading that around Europe (not knowing exactly the boundaries of the thing) there are around 400 music festivals. All genres included I´d guess.
I gotta say I´m a festivals virgin. I´ve been to a few different festivals but never did the camping bit festivals are associated with. Shameful, I know. The special thing about festivals is that, unlike that single concert you´re going to watch in the afternoon/evening which is already enough to make such day a special day, is basically a few days of music experience surround by thousands of others hoping for a good day of talented being displayed not only in one stage but in two, three, four.....or to the point I want to make with this post..... this .
I´m not posting that one particularly for the line up or the festival in itself. But...look at it. Here, like I mentioned, we´re used to 3 stages at a festival. Maybe even four or five with those stages being a bit different (at the entrance of the festival or even in some place near the festival but not exactly on the grounds of it). But there you can´t even know exactly how many they are because after those two main arenas they just put a bunch of names and say "appearing across all music arenas".
Then you go down the line up just to see theatre, dance, film, comedy, spoken word, literary arenas! When you go to a (normal?...) festival you know beforehand that you will have to compromise this or that band or even a good place in the crowd because you wanna see that other band playing on the stage on the other side of the place. Now imagine going to one like this. Imagine one of your friends wants you to watch a cool movie on the film tent...or a really good comedian on the comedy tent...or he wants you to go check that dj on the electronic tent because he plays that one cool song (gotta say that is a good tent to go spend some time late at night on a festival, at least I like it...maybe because I don´t listen or go out for that kind of music)... Conclusion: you have to be prepared for some busy 3/4 days and take a couple more afterwards to sleep because sleep must be vastly overrated at Latitude festival and the likes of it.
Let´s not even talk Glastonbury...I don´t know much apart from videos on Youtube, photos and some news articles but it looks like a league of its own. On the line-up it says "acts & attraction across over 100 stages"...on a festival for more than 175.000 people... I´ve been to a day in one festival with almost 100.000 and it had a couple of stages and a few attractions...I thought it was awesome...
