At one time, you had to carry a crumpled-up paper programme in your back pocket, the map you always left at lunchtime and a lot of standing around wondering if you had missed the act you loved. If you’ve ever waited for an hour at a festival in the UK to find the set you wanted, you’ll understand the frustration.
This is a time that is slowly coming to a close. In the UK, and worldwide, festivals are redefining themselves through mobile technology – and the impact of mobile on the real day-out experience is greater than most people realise.
The Problem With the Old Way of Doing Things
The organisation of festivals has always been extremely demanding. Lots of stages, thousands of people, dozens of food vendors, security, medical staff, and changing weather… It’s a lot to coordinate, and for many years, most of that coordination was done on paper or a walkie-talkie.
Even if they did not witness the scene, the attendee felt there was chaos. The time of the stage changes, but nobody knows until they have walked halfway across the site. It starts to rain heavily, and you can’t reach thousands of people simultaneously. A queue builds up in front of the gate because it is not possible to scan tickets by hand fast enough to catch the queue of people coming in.
Enter the Festival App
The differences are that the festivals have restructured the whole festival experience from a paper map, printed programme, tannoy announcement and a lot of ‘guessing’ around to a single mobile app.
The platforms are created for this purpose, for example, BigLive. It’s not about trying to adapt software for corporate conferences; it’s about building software that works for a large outdoor concert where people want to navigate the massive site; where they want personalised schedules so they can plan their day around shows that interest them; where they can get warnings and evacuations on the fly; where they want to interact with maps.
It is initially a small convenience, but when you are an agrarian trying to find out where Stage 3 is.
It’s Not Just About Convenience
But the more interesting change is what is going on in the background. Organisers who employ such technology have a real-time picture of what’s happening at their venue, such as where people are getting crowded, which parts of the show are capturing the most attention, and where people are spending their money. Much better than the old method of walking the site and making an eye estimate!
It also alters the time it takes a problem to be addressed by festivals. In the event of a crowd starting to congregate in a threatening manner near one stage, that crowd can be seen by the organisers and not heard of afterwards. In the UK, a festival-goer knows a bit about severe weather, and if it’s coming, a single push notification can reach a whole crowd in seconds, which can make all the difference when it comes to weather that can change in a matter of minutes.
Safety Is Quietly Becoming the Bigger Story
All that’s being said about convenience, the safety element is probably the most important of this change. Emergency chat enables attendees to mark up a problem right from their phone without having to seek out a steward in a crowd of fifty thousand. Ten years ago, there was not quite such a direct connection between attendees and response teams, and it’s becoming a quietly critical aspect of how large events keep people safe.
Why This Matters for the Festivals We Love
The UK boasts one of the more densely packed festival schedules in the world and people’s tastes and expectations have changed just as much as all the other things in everyday life! Users of apps to order a coffee, book a train and check the weather don’t expect to find a crumpled paper map in a festival that costs £200 to attend.
The festivals that are getting it right are creating feedback loops that make these festivals even easier to attend, safer to attend, and even better to run. While most in the crowd may not be aware of it, it’s a pretty big change for an industry that’s been operating for decades with radios and printed schedules.
Feature image by Pexels
