Festival capacity cut to avoid overcrowding, Emily Eavis says

Glastonbury Festival has sold “a few thousand less tickets” this year in an attempt to ease the build-up of heavy crowds, organiser Emily Eavis has said.

This year’s event, which will take place in Somerset later this month, is sold out but will not use its full 210,000 capacity.

“It’ll be interesting just to see how that affects the dynamics on site,” Eavis told the BBC’s Sidetracked podcast, adding that she wants to see if the reduction “can make an impact on some of the busier times”.

She revealed they have also created more room for the audience at the Other Stage, the festival’s second-biggest arena, where Charli XCX is expected to attract a huge crowd when she headlines on the Saturday night.

The Shangri-La nightlife area will also have more room after the festival bought extra land, she said.

Eavis said she had asked a meeting of 250 Glastonbury staff whether anyone thought the festival was overcrowded last year, and no-one put their hand up.

“And I was like, [that’s] interesting, because there’s a lot of talk, some people think that it was.”

Festival-goers will be urged to use different routes and make use of the whole site to ease congestion.

“Interestingly, people have moved slightly differently since Covid. So they tend to move more in a herd,” Eavis said. “So my main thing really this year is just to communicate that there are like 10 routes to anywhere.”

Organisers can predict which areas are likely to be busiest by tracking the most popular artists among fans who use the festival app’s schedule planner.

“The app was really accurate last year. People plan what they’re going to see. We can see what they’re going to see, which is really useful for us from a crowd perspective,” she said.

This year’s festival runs from Wednesday 25 June to Monday 30 June and will be headlined by Olivia Rodrigo, The 1975 and Neil Young.

Its current licence allows up to 210,000 people on site including fans, staff and performers.

In a wide-ranging interview with presenters Annie Macmanus and Nick Grimshaw, Eavis said they donated £5.9m to charity last year, “the largest sum we’ve managed to do”.

They usually “actively try not to make a profit”, but have had to do so in the last couple of years having lost £10m due to Covid.

She also revealed that they have to pay an extra £1m for extra expenses if there is wet weather, including tonnes of woodchip on the ground to stop people from slipping in the mud.

The festival pays its stars “a lot less” than they could earn from their own major commercial gigs – but it has increased its fees in recent years, she said.

“We are paying people a lot more than we ever have but it’s not as much as you would get doing Hyde Park.

“It’s such a corporate world, especially in the music industry. We are offered a lot of things that we turn down.”

She told the podcast: “The whole thing is based on goodwill.

“Imagine if we tried to sell it out [to commercial brands]. It would be awful, it would be the end. I’d rather literally die before that happened. It just can’t happen.”

The festival’s founder Michael Eavis has passed the day-to-day running of the festival to his daughter, and officially transferred his financial shares in the company to her in October 2024.

He will be 90 in October and is still “mentally completely following everything”, Emily said.

“We want to make this festival a big birthday moment for him as well.”

Asked about a slot on the Pyramid Stage line-up for a mystery band called Patchwork, Eavis wouldn’t be drawn on their identity.

“I’ve been working on Patchwork for a long time,” she said, adding that planning for their appearance had taken about a year for “logistical” reasons.

On Monday, social media account Secretglasto said Pulp are Patchwork, although the band’s spokesman has said they are not playing.