Download Festival: The Safety of the Big Bands

Download Festival: arguably the biggest and best rock festival in the UK; has gifted us with this year's line-up for the Donington Park piss-up starting from the 12th-14th June in 2020. While some may be thrilled with our 3 headliners (KISS, Iron Maiden, and System of a Down), others may have noticed the extremity of Andy Copping's repetitive booking choices.

Download Festival 2018

It has come to many people's attention how over the last (at least) 11 years, there has been a large reoccurrence of bands within Download Festival's 3 headliners. There has been an unavoidable level of repetition that has begun to affect the morale of the festival-goers; there are a few people in my usual group that have already decided the 2020 Download lineup isn't worth the money since we've seen them all before! For Example, the 2020 headliners alone (Kiss, Iron Maiden, and System of a Down) have taken up 8 headline spots over the last 11 years. Others include Slipknot (with the most reoccurrence at 4 spots), Def Leppard, Black Sabbath - including Ozzy Osborne's solo appearance in 2018, Rammstein, Aerosmith, and Avenged Sevenfold. All of the aforementioned bands have headlined the festival more than once in the last 11 years, taking up a huge 22 slots of the 33 available (3 headline slots over 11 years).

It's very easy to assume that Download Festival, specifically Andy Copping, have limited choice in this matter as they have to sell tickets and the big bands sell. If they decided to hire a lineup of lesser-known bands they may have massively reduced ticket sales, resulting in funding issues for the following year. When asked what their opinion on why the festival does this every year, an avid Download Festival-goer, Jack Salter, says: " They need to play it safe in order to get ticket sales - they can't afford to throw curveballs". Although it makes sense, it's quite disappointing to be seeing the same headliners over and over. It makes the fun of guessing the following the year's headliners considerably less fun - you can just look at the 9 previously mentioned bands and see who hasn't made a recent appearance and who's had a recent album. There's a clear assumption that the festival is required to stay within their comfort zone of the same 9 bands, however, I'm willing to challenge that comfort.

Trivium at Download Festival 2019

It's conceivable that the big bands we have today had their break by someone putting faith into them at a festival in the 80s/90s, with no one doing that these days we can't expect to see any new big bands. Someone in the festival industry has to take a leap of faith for a smaller band and there's a simple, safe way of doing it. You see smaller festivals doing this quite often, and sometimes even with bigger festivals on what's considered to be their 'off' years. If a habit was made a cushioning a smaller (good) band between two already big bands e.g. Metallica and Muse, it would give the smaller bands a chance to fame while also keeping ticket sales relatively safe.

So there's a suggestion for you Mr Copping, get a smaller band up there next to your pals in Def Leppard and Black Sabbath and you may even get some new revenue in the younger generations.