Glastonbury numbers: Worse than we guessed

Reuters reports today on the figures for Glastonbury tickets this year:

Festival chief Michael Eavis is mystified by the lethargic sales. In February, roughly 225,000 people registered for tickets. Last year, the corresponding registration -- a prerequisite to buying tickets -- was 400,000.

After tickets went public April 6, only 100,000 were snapped up, prompting Eavis to reopen registration two days later. Last year, the entire allocation of 137,500 tickets sold out in about two hours.

Blimey - somewhere between a quarter and a third of tickets left on the shelves, and nearly a fifty per cent drop in registrations.

Michael Eavis is puzzled:

"Why did all those people preregister then?" Eavis asks. "Something is happening somewhere."

The something he points his finger at is the weather, of course - conveniently, something out of his control. The simple, obvious fact - that people will preregister to keep their options open - doesn't seem to have occurred to him; nor that the real worry - for a man who told the Guardian the other week that he's got about £1.3million in debt hanging on the festival site - is not that a few people register and not buy, but that so few people bothered to register in the first place.

Eavis' dream for years was to find a way of making Glastonbury impenetrable to people without tickets - it looks like he's got his wish. But at a hell of a cost.