Woah, big mistake bigging up the Latitude Festival yesterday. There seem to be lots of anti-Mean Fiddler/Live Nation sentiments out there in grass roots music land at the moment. I just like genuinely cross-genre festivals, that is all. I make no comment about the corporations who may financially back them.
Still, I should have known I was treading on dangerous ground backing up Glastonbury boss Michael Eavis in his previously reported recommendation of the Latitude Festival to those music fans who had missed out on Glastonbury tickets, given the outrage there has been in blog land this week regarding an email sent out to Glasto registrants plugging Latitude, a festival staged by Eavis' partners on Glastonbury, the Live Nation owned Mean Fiddler.
Of course this year, in an admirable bid to beat the touts, anyone wanting to buy tickets for Glastonbury had to pre-register with the festival's website before tickets went on sale giving, among other things, their email address. During that registration process, hopeful ticket buyers were told: "No information collected by registration will be offered for sale or used by any third party organisation. Unsuccessful ticket applicants will have their data destroyed and all ticket holders' registration details and photos will be destroyed within one month of the 2007 festival".
But earlier this week many of those who registered received an email plugging the Latitude Festival. Saying pretty much the same as the quote attributed to Michael Eavis in the media this week (the quote we reported on yesterday), the email read: "Dear Festival Goer, I'm sorry you were unable to get a ticket to Glastonbury this year. I hope there will be another chance for you to come during the next four years. Of course there's always BBC TV and radio to keep you in touch with the music that will be going on around the various stages. Can I suggest that you might like to look at the possibility of going to another festival - namely the Latitude Festival, set in a beautiful part of Suffolk. Although much smaller it has some terrific music and has a similar feel to it by way of theatre comedy circus and much more. Best wishes and thank you so much for supporting our festival, Latitude Festival".
Pretty much as soon as the email had been sent many Glasto registrants were emailing or blogging their outrage that Mean Fiddler had used email information supplied for the purpose of buying Glastonbury tickets to promote a different festival.
Some were also questioning the legality of the email - firstly because it didn't offer any unsubscribe/opt out information as mass emails are meant to, but secondly, and more importantly, because of the original no-spam pledge made on the Glastonbury registration site. IT website The Register, who know a thing or two about data protection rules, have been investigating, and say that it is possible that the confusion has come about because there were two sets of terms and conditions in the Glastonbury registration/ticket buying process, those set by Glasto itself, which included the no-spam pledge, and those set by See Tickets, who actually do the ticket sale, and whose t+cs allow them to send promotional emails out to anyone who ticks the "third party box" on the application form. The thought is that people were ticking the third party box without realising what it meant, and that's how they ended up on the Mean Fiddler/Latitude mailing list. Although many of those blogging about the whole thing are adamant they never ticked any third party box, so that may or may not be how the Latitude mailing list was aggregated - neither Glastonbury nor Mean Fiddler have commented as yet on where the list came from.
Glasto have, however, apologised, issuing the following statement to some of those spammed: "You were sent an email about Latitude Festival 2007, which should not have happened. For this, we unreservedly apologise. It will not happen again. We would emphasise that Glastonbury festival takes the issue of Data Protection and the privacy of those who registered with us extremely seriously. Your personal details have not been sold on to anyone else and will not be passed on to anyone else. As agreed during the registration process, all details collected during registration will be destroyed a month after the festival. We are sorry for the inconvenience we have caused".
So there you go. There's a moral in all this somewhere. Stick to excessively bigging up Bestival, probably.