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Business News Gigs & Festivals Live Business
Glastonbury posts 2013 profits
By Aly Barchi | Published on Friday 10 October 2014
Look, will you all quit moaning that you’ve had to pay £225 for Glastonbury tickets? Poor you, sat in your chair, with £225 to blow on a long weekend in a Somerset bog, and a ton of great live bands and ‘solo artists’ to look forward to. Boo hoo.
Anyway, while you’re doing all that, at least take a sec to think of the festival itself, which, confirm accounts filed by Companies House earlier this week and seen by The Guardian, made a relatively small pre-tax profit of £764,000 on its 2013 event. And that’s relative to the fact that it shifted £35m in ticket sales.
And remember, by taking a year off in 2012 (Glastonbury having its ‘occasional fallow year policy’), 2013’s profits had to cover the Glasto company’s costs from the previous year too (when the firm reported a £544,000 loss). So, most of that £225 is paying for the fun times, while Michael Eavis’s cash cow is more likely his cows.
In very brief terms, the lengthy expenses sheet shows that £348,000 of Eavis and co’s total 2013 profit was donated to various charities; whilst Eavis, his relatives, and several companies affiliated with him claimed slightly over £2.6 million to cover staff and stage-hire costs, land rental, and compensation for earnings lost on Worthy Farm. I’d imagine 2013 Pyramid headliners The Rolling Stones took a fair bit from the kitty, too. And those tax efficient Arctic Monkeys.
So all in all a modest profit, but a profit nonetheless, which is a small victory in today’s dicey festival ‘clime’, when it’s a stretch for many events to break even, or even to go ahead in the first place. Whilst the financial data from this year’s Arcade Fire/Kasabian/Dolly-featuring festival are still to be filed, the 2013 accounts show that Glastonbury 2014 had taken £6.58 million (sans VAT) in advance ticket sales by the end of last year. Which can’t be bad.