According to last week’s poll conducted by MSN for Gigwise, 60% of young people are unable to go to a music festival this year as they have become prohibitively unaffordable.

The survey also revealed that the average age of the British festival-goer was now four months shy of 30 years old, presumably because the less affluent younger punters make up proportionately less of the crowd these days. The survey of 2000 people reads more like an MSN press release than a robust piece of research, but its statistics contain a kernel of truth: festivals are less affordable than they used to be.

But why have prices in a festival market that has become so much more competitive over the past decade not got, well, more competitive? One good example is Glastonbury which has doubled its ticket prices in 10 years.

Music industry analyst Mark Mulligan says that the main reason is that artists now demand higher fees due to the declining sales of physical formats. “The big background trend is that since Napster came along the sacristy of recorded music has disappeared so live music is the one scarce product the music industry has to sell,” he explains, “Teenagers and people in their early 20s increasingly can’t afford to go to festivals. The harsh reality is that festivals like Glastonbury can thrive without them if they need to because there’re so many 30-somethings who are willing to pay the money.”

Mulligan says that UK festival owners are getting hit by the greater fees demanded by artists and promoters, who now face profit margins that are much more slender than they were in the past.
  

  
Bestival manager and co-owner Robert Gorham, aka Rob da Bank, broadly agrees with Mulligan. He sympathises with artists recouping lost physical revenues by charging more for live shows but acknowledges fierce negotiation with promoters over artist’s fees.

“Our bill for DJs this year has at least doubled on last year,” he says, “Promoters run very tight ships these days and they sometimes get away with not spending anything on creative for their shows…Five years ago new bands used to charge around £150 to play. Now some change thousands.”

With a greater number of festivals competing for talent, it’s become a sellers’ market for artists. According to Gorham, these days some bands are doing fewer festivals because they know they can make the same amount of money in a year for fewer shows.

Gorham says that as long as the sun is shining Bestival still runs at a similar profit margin as it did five to ten years ago. He says that ticket price increases – around £10 a year – are down to the bill for talent going up as well as other costs including insurance, security and infrastructure. He says the police have also gone from seeing Bestival as a nuisance to seeing it as a cash cow.

“We don’t scrimp on making the festival look great. My wife spends six-figure sums making the show look incredible,” he says, referring to everything from the festival’s hand-made Indian tents to its pyrotechnics, “We always sweat about putting prices up, we want to keep them the same but at the end of the day it’s just economics.”

FACT spoke to several festival managers who all said that they face cost increases over and above inflation on ticketing, security and the health and safety provisions associated with keeping their festivals up with industry-wide regulations, which have become tighter after recent tragedies. Despite this, the managers said that their profit margins had either stayed the same or decreased and that they take more of a hit on these costs than festival-goers do.
  

  
One of them is Chris Greenwood, veteran of the UK festival circuit and owner of Croatia’s Stop Making Sense festival. “Raising prices could price me out of the market,” he says. “Everyone has tightened their belts.”

“DJs want to make hay when the sun shines because they rely on live sales and don’t necessarily have careers as long as they used to,” he explains. “When they’re hot they really milk it.”

UK festivals have become less squeamish about turning to corporate sponsors due to cost pressures, says Greenwood. “Before Stop Making Sense I did 80 festivals for Bacardi,” he said. “I used to run the B-Bar which was probably one of the first brands to take dance music to traditional festivals like Oxegen, Reading, Glasto and T in the Park.”

“The first time I did Glasto we nearly got tarred in feathers! ‘Bacardi at Glasto?! Shock horror!’ But now it’s all a brand-fest.”

The economic downturn has resulted in less sponsorship money to go round and with UK festivals facing tighter margins they are increasingly all too happy to sign up to sponsorship deals when they do come along.

The downturn is arguably also the most important reason behind the results of the MSN survey, says Steve Machin, founding director of specialist ticketing consultancy firm Stormcrowd. “The survey claimed that young people were saying they don’t have the spare cash to go,” he explains. “It drew an assumption that the cost of festivals is the reason.”

Machin thinks that macro-economic factors are the biggest reasons for young people finding festivals unaffordable, namely youth unemployment and the cost of other things that young people spend their money on, for example food and housing. This could explain why the average age at UK festivals has gone up as older, more affluent punters replace younger attendees.

He suggests that the “inflection point on the macroeconomic cycle might have been hit where young people can’t afford a whole host of things including music festival tickets.”

The true story behind the MSN figures is a mixture of piracy pushing up the price of live music and a generation of younger people that is likely to be poorer in real terms than the one that preceded it.

In many ways the news may be worse than the MSN survey suggests: not only can young people not afford to go to festivals, they can’t afford to do anything.

Head here to read FACT’s How To…Run A Festival And Not Go Bust guide, featuring contributions from the founders of Glastonbury, Sonar, Exit, Dimensions, MUTEK and many, many more. 

Available on: Matador LP

There’s not much about Savages’ music that you could call wildly original. Like their Matador labelmates Cold Cave and Interpol, they can be derivative to a fault, but unlike those bands their music is backed up by a strong ideology and compelling personality. That’s part of debut album Silence Yourself’s appeal: though Savages wear their influences proudly, they have an individual voice. In that sense, Silence Yourself isn’t just a technical throwback to post-punk and no wave, but also to a time when music had something to say, when bands had names like Gang Of Four and Joy Division.

That last is the most obvious of Savages’ inspirations, but The Birthday Party, Mission of Burma, Wire, Die Form, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus are others that spring to mind immediately upon hearing Silence Yourself. It’s in the coarse, stark, blunted instrumentation; the moody, any-colour-as-long-as-it’s-black aesthetic; the snarled vocals and the grimacing attitude. But where the earlier bands took their lyrical and thematic cues from an anarchic, subversive politics or inner darkness and failure, Silence Yourself addresses the dynamics of human relationships, sexuality, violence and the self (rather like Throbbing Gristle in this respect). It’s something both the poem-like announcement on the album’s cover (actually lyrics from opening song ‘Shut Up’) and the manifesto that accompanies the album underline. “If the world would shut up,” the cover reads (in ALL CAPS, naturally), “Perhaps / We would start hearing / The distant rhythm / Of an angry young tune.”

‘Shut Up’’s title alone should indicate how Silence Yourself doesn’t obfuscate but packs all the blunt force of a kick to the solar plexus. The chorus – “If you tell me to shut up / I’ll tell you to shut up” – evokes both the fierce will to independence and truth to the self that constitutes the album’s ideological lifeblood. Where ‘Shut Up’ is precise, ‘City’s Full’ is a maelstrom of distortion, and ‘I Am Here’ is all vocal and brutal tom-drum until distorted guitars explode for the chorus. The messiest, most abrasive song on Silence Yourself,  the one-take live track ‘Hit Me’, clocks in at just over one and a half minutes. “Tell me I’m miserable now… he hit me / And that was the best I ever had” sneers frontwoman Jehnny Beth, inverting the victimisation of The Crystals song whose title the lyrics recall; the power, unexpectedly, is in the hands of the masochist. The intimacy of ‘Hit Me’ becomes alienation in ‘Husbands’. Opening with the line, “I woke up and I saw the face of a guy / I don’t know who he was”, Beth adopts a Patti Smith shriek for the chorus (“My house / My bed / My husbands, husbands, husbands, husbands, husbands, husbands, husbands”) that divorces word from referent, effecting distance where you would expect closeness.

‘Dead Nature’ and ‘Marshal Dear’, look inward, though what they lack in primal urgency they make up for with ominousness. The drones and church bells of ‘Dead Nature’ sound as if they’ve been recorded in a dank cave and ‘Marshal Dear’ is the only song on the album to feature a piano and a sax. Beth’s voice here recalls To Bring You My Love-era PJ Harvey’s silken-yet-raw howl as she yelps the refrain “Silence yourself”, hammering home the need for honesty to the self.

Part of the manifesto sent out with the album reads as follows: “SAVAGES is not trying to give you something you didn’t have already, it is calling within yourself something you buried ages ago”. It’s the closest you’ll get to an apology for unoriginality from a band that doesn’t apologise. Whether you’ll enjoy Silence Yourself depends largely on your taste for post-punk and no wave; Savages may draw inspiration from some of the best alternative music of the last thirty years but they can be derivative to a fault. That said, their obvious musical talent and distinctive voice make Silence Yourself an uncompromising and very enjoyable paean to individual agency.

Club crew B.YRSLF have churned out another free olio celebrating the energetic and the antic.

The French clique have aligned themselves with a global network of beatmakers producing their own gaudy take on Stateside sounds, with Cedaa, DJ Hilti and Slick Shoota among the artists offering mutant versions of juke, Baltimore house and ballroom. They’re generous evangelists too, putting out a number of free compilations (including last year’s Summer Crisis set).

Their latest goodie-bag is Transistor Rhythm, a various artists compilation assembling 23 tracks from the wilder/goofier end of the club music spectrum. Subtitled ’808 & Ghettobass Special’, the collection features a host of footwork-indebted bass sounds. Embassy boss Distal is the biggest name in the set, with Fade To Mind graduate Cedaa and Russian rabble-rouser Pixelord also making the cut. Further acts include Visionn, DJ Taye and Seapoint.

A Facebook follow will earn you the compilation; click below to stream snippets of all the featured tracks. [via XLR8R]

Tracklist: 
SOUNDBANK # 1 :
01 @Pixelord – Floppy Room [EXCLUSIVE]
02 @Vlsonn – East Clipper [EXCLUSIVE]
03 @SlickShoota x @Principal-Dean & Snakefoot – Pussyclot Funk Dem 2013 [EXCLUSIVE]
04 @Margaret-Antwood – V00D000 [EXCLUSIVE]
05 @Cedaa & @Distal – 20K (BYRSLF005)
06 @Esgar – Higher [EXCLUSIVE]
07 @DJHilti – Pimp Sooo G!!! (@DJRoc-1 Remix) (BYRSLF003)
08 @Sines-1 – Drop Gimme (BYRSLF001)
09 @Keiska – Celdi Riddim (BYRSLF004)
10 @DJTaye – No The Usual (B.YRSLF & STILL MUZIK V/A)
11 @DJHilti – Ready [EXCLUSIVE]
12 @Elefo – I was Afraid (BYRSLF007)

SOUNDBANK # 2 :
01 @Dev79 – Won’t Turn Down [EXCLUSIVE]
02 @Plot-Twist – Crashed [EXCLUSIVE]
03 @Vlsonn – Asthma [EXCLUSIVE]
04 @Seapoint – Euvolemic [EXCLUSIVE]
05 @Elefo – Together [EXCLUSIVE]
06 @Adminuk & @Mahni – Formattin’ (@Magnumbass remix) (BYRSLF011)
07 @Umba89 – 12;05 (BYRSLF010)
08 @Mite + @E-walk – Iron Gaiden (BYRSLF013)
09 @BD1982 – Zero Hours (BYRSLF014)
10 @Simon-off – Day In Day Out (BYRSLF004)
11 @Adminuk – Pink Gloves (@Konga-Konga Remix) (BYRSLF011)

Bristol-born mumbler Tricky is back with his first album in three years – and it’s arguably his best since 1996′s Pre-Millennium Tension. 

Released on his new label of the same name, False Idols sees Tricky finally setting aside the cross-genre larking which characterised his last five-odd albums. No thrash, reggae or ‘Lovecats’ covers here – instead, False Idols is a focused exercise in brooding trip-hop and low-slung soul. Even if it lacks the free-associative brilliance of his first few records, it definitely shows Tricky stumbling back onto the right track. head to NPR to listen to album. [via Pigeons And Planes]

False Idols is due on May 28. FACT TV recently sat down with Tricky, easily one of our favourite episodes to date. Head here to watch our man from the West sound off about accidentally collaborating with Zebra Katz, quarrelling with Katie Price and his bumbling cameo at Beyonce’s Glastonbury show.

Punk warriors The Clash will go all LL Cool J on a new box set, overseen by guitarist Mick Jones. 

The Sound System box set will feature the band’s first five LPs – that’s The Clash (1977), Give ‘Em Enough Rope (1978), London Calling (1979), Sandinista! (1980) and Combat Rock (1982) – remastered from the original tapes by Jones. The set will also include three CDs of rarities, demos and singles, a DVD featuring previously unreleased footage, and a fresh edition of the band’s iconic Armagideon Time zine. Art direction has been co-ordinated by Clash bassist Paul Simonon, who has elected to design the box in the shape and style of a vintage boombox.

According to Jones, the “concept of the whole thing is: best box set ever”:

“Remastering’s a really amazing thing. That was the musical point of it all, because there’s so much there that you wouldn’t have heard before. It was like discovering stuff, because the advances in mastering are so immense since the last time [the Clash back catalogue] was remastered in the 90s…We had to bake the tapes beforehand – the oxide on them is where the music is, so if you don’t put them in the oven and bake them, that all falls off, because they’re so old.”

The box set will be accompanied by The Clash Hits Back, a 33-track 2xCD compilation. The album has been sequenced in line with the band’s set at Brixton Academy (then the Brixton Fair Deal) on July 1982, albeit with a glut of extra tracks stuck on at the end.

Both Sound System and The Clash Hits Back are due on September 9. A trailer for the former is available to view below. [via The Guardian]

Tracklist:

Disc 1 
1. London Calling
2. Safe European Home
3. Know Your Rights
4. (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais
5. Janie Jones
6. The Guns of Brixton
7. Train in Vain
8. Bankrobber
9. Wrong ‘Em Boyo
10. The Magnificent Seven
11. Police on my Back
12. Rock the Casbah
13. Career Opportunities
14. Police & Thieves
15. Somebody Got Murdered
16. Brand New Cadillac
17. Working for the Clampdown

Disc 2 
1. Ghetto Defendant
2. Armagideon Time
3. Stay Free
4. I Fought the Law
5. Straight To Hell
6. Should I Stay or Should I Go?
7. Garageland
8. White Riot
9. Complete Control
10. Clash City Rockers
11. Tommy Gun
12. English Civil War
13. The Call Up
14. Hitsville UK
15. This Is Radio Clash

Noted chicken enthusiast Beyoncé toasts her maturity in her new single. 

Snippets of ‘Grown Woman’ first appeared in last month’s rug-pulling Pepsi advert. In contrast to the lacquered surfaces of The 20/20 Experience, ‘Grown Woman’ sees Timbo on playful and experimental form, crafting an instrumental that’s two parts moombahton, one part Song Of The South. B, aided and abetted by The-Dream, continues to push the warrior queen motifs found on ‘Run The World (Girls)’ and ‘Bow Down/I Been On’.

Note: The-Dream’s also been working with Beyoncé cohort Kelly Rowland. FACT’s review of Beyoncé’s recent O2 jaunt is here. [via Miss Info]

The co-founder and keyboardist of The Doors dies at 74.

According to The Doors’ Facebook page, Manzarek died earlier today after a lengthy battle with bile cancer.

Manzarek is best known for his time with The Doors, a band he founded with Jim Morrison after a chance encounter in 1965. The Doors were one of the most controversial bands of the psychedelic era until Morrison’s death in 1971, with Manzarek’s signature sound provided by a Fender Rhodes piano and the Vox Continental combo organ.

After The Doors, Manzarek continued performing as a solo artist, with Nite City, and, beginning in 2002, with Doors’ guitarist Robby Krieger. In lieu of flowers, his family is asking that donations be made to Standup 2 Cancer.

The first lady of Three Six Mafia returns.

It’s finally here, Gangsta Boo‘s It’s Game Involved has been hinted at for what seems like a decade but now it’s landed and what’s more it’s pretty darn good. Mostly produced by Drumma Boy, It’s Game Involved features a number of guest spots from Spaceghostpurrp‘s Raider Klan, which should give rap backpackers a wry grin. It’s no secret that Purrp’s crew have fetishized Triple Six since day one, so hearing them sharing tracks is pretty much a mach made in heaven.

Elsewhere there are guest spots from Bun B, Young Turk and Big K.R.I.T. but It’s Game Involved is about Gangsta Boo and it’s damn good to have her back.

Get your earplugs ready.

Last year’s full-length The Seer was a brilliant and succinct culmination of the Swans catalogue to date, and stood as one of the finest albums of 2013. It’s only right then that the album should get a proper tour, and Michael Gira’s boys are due to traipse through the US and Europe from now until the end of the summer.

For those Swans fans who want to see something a little different, Sacred Bones’ Pharmakon will be supporting the band on their Iowa, Kentucky, Ohio and Buffalo, New York dates bringing her particular brand of gruesome, overdriven noise to the party. [via Pitchfork]

05-20 Zagreb, Croatia – Pogon JEedinstvo
05-21 Parma, Italy – Campus Industry Music
05-22 Geneva, Switzerland – L’usinie
05-23 Schorndorf, Germany – Club Manufaktur
05-24 Barcelona, Spain – Primavera Festival
05-25 Paris, France – La Grande Halle de la Villette
05-27 Frankfurt, Germany – Mousonturm
05-28 Berlin, Germany – Volksbühne
05-29 Dresden, Germany – Beatpol
05-30 Munich, Germany – Feierwerk
05-31 Porto, Portugal – Optimus Primavera Sound
06-13 Brooklyn, NY – Northside Music Festival (Warsaw)
06-14 Pittsburgh, PA – Rex Theater
06-16 Manchester, TN – Bonnaroo
06-19 Calgary, Alberta- Sled Island Festival
06-22 Hlvarenbeek, Netherlands – Best Kept Secret Festival
06-23 Clisson, France – Hell Fest
07-18 Indianapolis, IN – Deluxe at Olde National Centre
07-19 Detroit, MI – Majestic Theatre
07-20 Chicago, IL – Pitchfork Music Festival
07-22 Iowa City, IA – Blue Moose Tap House
07-23 Newport, KY – Southgate House
07-24 Columbus, OH – The Bluestone
07-25 Cleveland, OH – Beachland Ballroom
07-26 Buffalo, NY – Tralf Music Hall
08-13 Edinburgh, Scotland – Liquid Room
08-14 Belfast, Northern Ireland – Limelight
08-15 Dublin, Ireland – Button Factory
08-16 Cork, Ireland – Cyprus Avenue
08-18 Wales, England – Green Man Festival