An explosion of festivals occurs every year during the summer festival season. A good reason for this is unmistakably because many people love festivals. The combination of great music performances, dances, drinks, and people creates nothing short of a perfect party. However, you need to part with quite a significant amount of money to enjoy all the fun that comes with festivals. The tickets alone can be very pricey, and they won’t even include the cost of traveling or getting foods and drinks.
Where Does All the Money That You Spend Go?
Having spent a lot of money on tickets and the inflated drinks and food prices, you have to wonder where all that money goes. A good amount of it goes towards paying the artists and their agents, but where does the rest go? There is also a significant amount of cash, which is usually generated from sponsorships and fees charged to traders. It is easy to conclude that most of the money usually ends up in the bank accounts of the organizers, but that is not often the case.
Automatic VAT Deductions
One thing that most people usually do not know is that there is often a 20% automatic deduction of all the money collected during a festival. The money is deducted even before the organizers have paid the bands or promoters. In addition to that, the organizations in charge of copyrights and performances also deduct their percentage. The huge deduction from the total revenue leaves quite little to work with.
Venue Preparation
Among the first things that you notice when you get to a festival venue are the shining lights and tons of decorations all over. Transforming a standard space into the jaw-dropping spectacle that you see is usually quite a costly undertaking. Various factors influence the overall cost, such as the size of the festival and land hiring costs. There is also a lot of professional manual labor involved to get the entire set done.
Additional costs come in building the stage and perimeter walls, buying props, hiring security teams, providing sanitation facilities, and supplying power. You also need to factor in the cost of hiring and transporting all the necessary equipment.
The economics behind organizing a festival is a very delicate balance. There is a lot more to hosting a festival than just getting a band to perform for the crowd. It includes quite a lot of hard work and entails numerous risks. This is one of the reasons why it costs you quite a lot for you to enjoy your festival weekend