Summer festivals... Glastonbury style

[Paul Mather]

On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 15:00 +0100, M Holmes wrote:
> Paul Mather writes:
>
> > Sounds to me that they are taking a leaf out of Hawkwind's book and
> > making sure they only admit people for whom they have name and address
> > details (to keep the police happy).
>
> Perhaps one could trace an "incident" to a named person in a festival of
> 400 people. Managing the feat amongst a quarter million people would be
> somewhat harder.

Nobody said a policy had to make sense to keep the police happy.

> > They also seemed to me to be paranoid about scalpers and getting paid.
>
> Why is that? I'd rather pay a tout than spend 14 hours hitting the
> bloody redial button. Basically I'm just paying them for the
> convenience.

Don't you have the option of paying a skivvy to spend 14 hours dialling
on your behalf?  You could pay them a bit extra to put on a fake Mike
Holmes accent when the time comes. ;-)

> If Glasters want to eliminate touts, then sell the tickets at the market
> price rather than under it. After all, those who can't afford it have
> the option of working the festival and getting free entry.

Actually, I think the identity requirement backed by personalised
tickets has a side effect of combatting touts and that combatting touts
might not be the primary goal.  They do seem to have chosen payment
methods that have the smallest chance of having payment
stopped/disputed, which bolsters the "paranoid about getting paid" idea,
though. :-)

In the end, though, I think they are doing all this "just because they
can."  The people willing to jump through all these hoops and willing to
be exposed to such personal scrutiny are more likely to be conformist
types able to be managed sheep-like, and hence less likely to cause
trouble for the organisers.  Alternatively, requirements such as the
identity proof might have been imposed by the police, citing a high
profile event like Glastonbury as a "terrorist target."

Cheers,

Paul.
--
e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
        --- Frank Vincent Zappa