The music industry took a huge hit during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, as venues closed their doors to the public, and events and festivals were canceled or postponed one by one. While some of the largest US festivals – Stagecoach, Bonnaroo, and Coachella – were among the last to hope for a fall 2020 edition, they were finally canceled in June as well.
To assess the coronavirus’ impact on the festival season, we turned to Viberate for correct data. In the Viberate report, they focus on the number of festivals that were canceled or postponed in the first weeks after the Covid-19 outbreak was classified as a pandemic. Viberate has studied the number of fans who were unable to attend, the estimated ticket loss, direct economic impact, and the correlation between economic impact and festival size. The final calculations made by Viberate were made on 21 April 2020, but have far-reaching consequences on the entire 2020 festival season.
The most affected festivals were those planned from March to May, immediately after the announcement of the pandemic. Some optimism remained until the end of April, as around 50% of the festivals had only been postponed, not yet canceled.
The estimated number of fans unable to attend music festivals after the first months of postponements and cancellations soon broke the 10M threshold. The loss, however, doesn’t only stem from the lack of ticket sales, as direct economic impact also affects other festival site businesses, such as food & drink and merch vendors, lockers etc.
How Viberate collect data?
Viberate has created a service called Sick Festivals, which monitored over 5,000 unique data-enriched festival pages in Viberate’s curated database. Viberate data science team collected and exported the entire festival database, following set parameters: festival name (we follow a strict “one festival = one-page” rule, which means there are no duplicate entries), country (festival location), size (we sort festivals in five different size classes, based on the number of visitors), and date (time of festival duration). Once Viberate filtered the festivals based on the five size classes, Viberate proceeded by using sampling methods, gathering available data on the average ticket price, and the average number of visitors. Viberate has applied additional statistical methods to eliminate anomalies and level out the data.
Whenever things do return to normal – and whatever this new “normal” will be –, everyone at Viberate will do their best to assist music professionals with:
1. MAKING LESS RISKY DATA-BASED DECISIONS With tighter budgets, there will be even less options for gut feelings and guesswork. We’re rolling out Viberate PRO, a tool that offers data-driven insights for music pros. Viberate PRO is currently in beta trial. With the tool, you can explore the PRO Charts to filter the artists by country, genre and subgenre, and then sort them by Viberate popularity, channel-specific parameters, and desired timeline. Additionally, you can check more in-depth information on Artist Pages. If you’re interested in gaining access, hit us up.
2. MAINTAINING FESTIVAL COMMUNITIES Clear and agile communication with fans is key. Consider an affordable and easily customizable mobile app, created for festival organizers, which eases promotional and communication efforts, and effortlessly feeds up-to-date content from our APIs to festivalgoers.
