What it really costs to headline Glastonbury

Not for the first time, Taylor Swift sent her fans into a frenzy. It was last June and the world’s biggest popstar had just announced the European dates of her blockbuster Eras tour, leaving an obvious, Glastonbury-sized hole in the schedule.

Cue fevered speculation that Swift — who originally agreed to headline the Pyramid stage in 2020 before the pandemic intervened — would take her belated bow at Worthy Farm. Emily Eavis, Glastonbury’s organiser, said in 2022 that “I think we’ve got Taylor on board next time she’s doing some touring”.

But after weeks of hope came the hammer blow. Instead, for each of the festival’s three nights Swift, 34, will be playing Dublin’s Aviva Stadium as her juggernaut of a tour rolls on. Glastonbury revellers will have to make do with Dua Lipa, Coldplay (for a record-breaking fifth time) and American RnB star SZA.

Swift is unusual, as the 34-year-old’s tour is the first in history to gross more than $1 billion (£790 million) in ticket sales, but the fact that she swerved Glastonbury illustrates an important point. The festival simply does not pay its headliners, or other acts, particularly well, and Swift is now too big to need the honour.

Lipa is obvious headliner material: a homegrown, global superstar coming into her prime with a new album out. But Coldplay, even to their defenders, feels like a safe bet, while SZA, despite her Grammy and Brit awards, was not first choice. Madonna, fresh off the success of her Celebration tour, was said to be lined up for the Sunday before rows over money put an end to those discussions. After last year’s all-male trio of headliners in the forms of Arctic Monkeys, Guns N’ Roses and Elton John, Glastonbury’s run of leading acts has been underwhelming.

Glastonbury is a unique festival because of its relative lack of corporate sponsorship, commitment to donating millions of pounds to charity each year and the blanket coverage provided to it by the BBC. Last year’s festival, which saw 140,000 descend on Worthy Farm, cost £62 million to put on and Glastonbury made a record £3.7 million in donations to good causes.

While many festivals have deep-pocketed sponsors, BST in Hyde Park is sponsored by American Express, Glastonbury eschews such revenue by giving its prime advertising spots to the charities Oxfam, Water Aid and Greenpeace.

The upshot is that Glastonbury, by its own admission, pays far less than other festivals — as little as 10 per cent of the £1 million-plus fees artists can earn. “We’re not in a situation where we’re able to just give people enormous amounts of money,” Eavis said in 2017. “So we’re really grateful for the bands that we get, because they’re basically doing it for the love of it.”

When the Rolling Stones played their bravura 2013 headline set, they built a huge catwalk into the crowd so that a dancing Mick Jagger could be closer to the punters and had a mechanical phoenix that came to life during Sympathy for the Devil. As a result, the band spent more money on staging the show than they were paid to do it. In the run-up to that year’s festival its founder, Sir Michael Eavis, admitted that they were not paid more than other headliners, despite being able to command millions for other one-off shows.

“There’s a bog-standard price for the headliner. We get the headliners for a tenth of the normal price. So they’re not being paid very much,” he said. Sir Paul McCartney got just £200,000 for his 2022 headline slot, when he is typically paid upwards of £2.5 million.

So why, when other festivals and stadium tours are more lucrative, do artists still play Glastonbury? Partly it is because Glastonbury sets live long in the memory and can be career-defining, coupled with Wimbledon levels of coverage on the BBC. Eavis also said in 2013: “Headliners are always good to us because they want to do it because they get TV and they get huge record sales straight after the show.”

The organiser of a rival festival sees it another way. “Glastonbury is a big TV show and the BBC pays for it. I resent that because I pay the licence fee, so I pay for Glastonbury and they pay 10 per cent of what I have to pay artists,” they say. “They pay a lot less than other festivals because of the BBC coverage.”

The Corporation is notoriously tight-lipped about how many millions of pounds it uses to secure exclusive broadcasting rights to the festival, as well as the cost of sending hundreds of staff to Somerset. It has historically used exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act protecting journalism and free expression to avoid answering questions put to it by licence fee payers.

For an artist like Stormzy, who headlined the Pyramid Stage in 2019 with a show that is said to have cost more to put on than any previous set, it marked the rapper’s definitive move from the grime world to the mainstream. In the week after Stormzy’s set, in which he wore a Banksy-designed Union Jack stab-proof vest, sales of his Gang Signs and Prayer album soared more than 300 per cent and leapt up the charts from 73rd to 14th. That same year Kylie Minogue, who was in the Sunday afternoon “legend” slot, released a greatest hits album to coincide with Glastonbury. It went straight to number one.

Alan Edwards, the acclaimed PR svengali, writes in his new book about how, in 2000, he got David Bowie to play a set on the Pyramid stage that helped revive his flagging career. The set went down in history, with Bowie playing to 250,000 people, even though the fee was paltry. “It was hilarious, it was about £20,000 or something and even then it wasn’t a lot of money,” says Edwards. “David was always an artist and he was driven by what he felt was the right thing and what he wanted to do, rather than what the payday was. He didn’t even ask. It was a cool thing to do. Glastonbury has got that wonderful legacy.”

Beyond the absence of Swift and Madonna from the line-up, there are signs that some artists will not put up with lower fees. Nadine Shah, who has been an outspoken advocate of fair remuneration for singers, said that she turned down a spot at Worthy Farm this year. “I would have liked to but I wasn’t offered a televised stage so I declined,” she said. “It’s too expensive a hit for me to take otherwise.”

John Giddings, the agent and promoter who runs the Isle of Wight Festival, says that he has discussed the (relative) lack of money on offer at Glastonbury with its organisers. “Michael Eavis once asked me how I booked Fleetwood Mac when he had been trying them for years,” Giddings tells me. “I said, ‘Michael, I paid them’.” Tellingly, despite early speculation that she may finally play the Sunday afternoon “legend” slot at Glastonbury, this year Stevie Nicks is one of the headliners for BST.

Mick Fleetwood said in 2019 that “I’ll burn in hell if we don’t do [Glastonbury] one day”, but Nicks herself said this month that, after the untimely death of Christine McVie in November 2022, there is now “no chance of putting Fleetwood Mac back together in any way”.

In a sense, none of this matters. Glastonbury’s £355 tickets sell out many months in advance of any acts being confirmed in the line-up, so Emily Eavis can almost do whatever she likes. Much of her focus in recent years has been to champion a new generation of performers, especially women, who have long been under-represented as festival headliners. Beyond the marquee gigs at this year’s festival are the likes of Fontaines DC, The Last Dinner Party and Little Simz. All have prominent slots, and are almost guaranteed an audience of tens of thousands each.

“We’re trying our best so the pipeline needs to be developed,” Eavis said last year. “This starts way back with the record companies, radio. I can shout as loud as I like but we need to get everyone on board.”