As Ears To The House has pointed out a few times lately, a number of festivals are in rather choppy waters right now. Two years of Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions have prevented several annual festivals from taking place – and there’s little point pretending this won’t have had a negative financial effect.
The result of this is festival owners are now going to have to get creative. For several years now, their strategy has largely consisted of booking from the top 1% of DJs at premium prices and hoping for the best. This was a high risk strategy which required the festival to sell pretty much every ticket going – and before the pandemic, it usually worked.
When festivals started resuming last year, it looked like the tactic still worked. Not anymore. Remember the post-pandemic renaissance written about in the dance music press? That turned out to be short-lived – and everyone’s having to think of new ideas. So what have Tomorrowland come up with?
Well, they’ve decided to go down the same road as Pete Tong, and launch their own DJ school. It’s going to be held in-person this year, with an online version due to begin next year. But unlike the Pete Tong school, this one is open for kids too – starting from as young as just eight years old at €189.
However, it’s the adult bootcamps which put this post firmly into the money spinner category. It costs €950 for four days – but if you fancy staying in a hotel, the price goes right up to €2,690. That’s the equivalent of €435 per night – we’d expect some seriously snazzy digs for that price….
How much more money will this bring in for the festival, which has been unable to run since 2019? We have no idea – but full credit goes to Tomorrowland for catching onto the latest money making wheeze…
