If Download Festival 2025 is to be believed, this is a summer of unseriousness.
At this past weekend’s Download Festival [13-15 June], we saw 90s icons Vengaboys pumping ‘We Like To Party’ to a crowd of enthusiastic metalheads. McFly played a mix of Metallica and incredibly feel good, pre-watershed pop to a main stage Saturday crowd. Instead of this being an incredibly regrettable decision from the band, the British foursome were officially welcomed by the Download faithful with a circle pit of approval.
Festivals such as Mighty Hoopla, who recently brought a mix of noughties stalwarts and Eurovision icons to London’s Brockwell Park, have been proven themselves to be major festival triumphs with somewhat unconventional line-ups. Holiday park adult-only weekenders and tribute act festivals creatively named things like ‘GlastonBarry‘ thrive, while many festivals continue to struggle.
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These success stories chart a big change in what punters are looking for in a modern festival, an element that may have been lost in recent years. Fun.
This is backed up by a few stats. Music Week recently reported that 44% of Download Festival’s 2025 ticket buyers were first time attendees. There are many ways to speculate why that is. There were new stage additions, and a greater emphasis on providing a wider festival ‘experience’. More food options, less 50p burgers sold for £10, for example. But for me, a key element comes in a more diverse line-up, where new, cross-genre acts such as Sleep Token and Poppy can stand their ground against the likes of Green Day and Steel Panther.
The Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) recently stated that music festivals need to appeal to younger audiences and innovate to survive in a modern, increasingly volatile landscape. And in a recently published report, the ticketing company Skiddle found that “split payment methods for festival ticket purchases on Skiddle saw a 48% increase in 2024 compared to 2023,” with the 18–35 age group being the most frequent users of split payment options.
Festivals have become more welcoming to the more diverse music tastes that modern, ticket buying people demand. And thankfully, times have changed since acts were bottled on stage for simply being outside of what the crowd wanted. Once upon a time, 2007 to be exact, My Chemical Romance dodged a wall of bottles at an edition of Download Festival that also saw Linkin Park and Iron Maiden headline. An arguably more infamous, and definitely much more career damaging, incident occurred when Daphne & Celeste took to the stage at Reading Festival in 2000, only to be met with a chorus of boos, discarded rubbish, and (likely) some bodily fluids thrown in pint glasses.
It’s important to say that this was a different time. Music genre was more defined, more based on the clothes you wore, which bands you loved and which bands you hated. It was before the term ‘rockist’ became outdated, which describes a certain section of rock fan who believe the genre should stay true to its original form and, for that reason, remains superior to all others.
But rock music has always been pop, at least in the literal ‘popular’ sense. And the genre hasn’t been shy of showcasing it either. Linkin Park produced an album with Jay-Z before Glastonbury truly embraced rap music. Limp Bizkit and Snoop Dogg were collaborating from as early as 2003. Way before then, we ‘Walked This Way’ with Aerosmith and RUN-DMC.
Despite this, for decades rock music has suffered from an elitist, gatekeeping image, all while being a cultural refuge for outsider audiences. In recent-ish years, though, the definition of what ‘alternative’ is in music has dramatically changed – and for the better.
“Punters still want to thrash to Cradle of Filth, as long as they can take the Vengabus there.”
In the early-90s, the alternative was dance music, where laws such as the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 banned the playing music with “a succession of repetitive beats” in order to destroy rave music – spoiler alert, it didn’t. Grime was given a similar treatment in the 2000s when the Metropolitan Police enforced Form 696. 696 was an event risk assessment form which, amongst other details, required music promoters to disclose the ethnic group of those likely to attend their event. The form has been criticised for overwhelmingly targeting grime, garage and R&B acts, but was repealed in 2017. Despite legal threats and government mandates, these genres are thriving in 2025. If that’s not Raging Against The Machine, then I don’t know what is.
While the merging of rock, rap, pop, country and every other genre I can think of has long been heard on our radios, it’s rarely been represented in the same way on the biggest festival stages. But, in 2025, that seems to be changing. The Prodigy now headline classically rock festivals. Stormzy represents grime as a headline act at Reading & Leeds. Nu-metal gods Korn, after over 30 years in the game, are getting their own brat girl summer with the endearing ‘korn are girl pop‘ social media movement. And yes, we can unironically mosh pit to McFly and Vengaboys at the UK’s biggest metal festival.
There probably is a wider conversation here in how ‘the music festival’ has become less about roughing it, more experiential. But it’s also about the changing wants from festival-goers. Punters still want to thrash to Cradle of Filth, as long as they can take the Vengabus there.
