Why can't festivals just announce their lineups any more?

As if the rigmarole of procuring tickets, making your way to the site and surviving three days in a rain-lashed field wasn’t exhausting enough, the runup to the festival season is starting to become an endurance test in itself. A growing number of festivals are making the once-instant unveiling of their lineups into a drawn out, convoluted process almost always involving a hashtag.

I can’t really lambast festival organisers for their attempts to create inventive, inviting marketing strategies, for they are not to blame. Any event today is automatically competing with hundreds of similarly billed gatherings around the world. In an over-saturated festival market, there’s an increased need to make what is essentially a list of names both alluring and relevant for an audience of digital natives.

Take, for example, Bonaroo. Organisers behind the event in Manchester, Tennessee, announced its lineup – including Billy Joel, Kendrick Lamar and Mumford & Sons – using the following three-step process: 1) call a number to get an artist’s name; 2) share the name of said artist using the hashtag bonaroo; 3) watch the #bonaroo feed to find out the whole lineup. Who said the digital generation had shrinking attention spans?

Primavera Sound, meanwhile, asked its prospective ticket buyers to download an app, which would reveal all the details of its lineup, with a bonus of an exclusive video of the British band Cinerama, fronted by David Gedge of the Wedding Present. And Boston Calling – this year featuring Beck, Pixies and My Morning Jacket – opted for a treasure hunt. The announcement of its lineup began with a “find the vinyl” competition across the city, sending participants to track down 11 records sketched with the name of some of the confirmed performers, in the hope pictures would begin popping up on social media.

Bigger festivals – such as Coachella – decide to tweet their lineups, relying on the fact they are already established brands with some digital clout. In fact, the California festival was so proud of its hashtag it even posted a graph of the web reaction. Rock’n’roll!

It’s the competitive nature, and need to draw in young audience members with a one-ticket per year budget, that has taken the promotional experimentation to a new level. As a friend who works in the marketing sector of the music industry told me, festival announcements are always affiliated with a desire for “content”, which often translates as “clickbait”. “Unless you do something to grab people’s attention and present them with an idea,” he said, “it is sadly such an overcrowded market place as far as festivals go that you simply won’t get the coverage.”

Social media provides a clear route to getting the info out, too: data provided by analyst Dan Zarrella found that tweets containing one or more hashtags were 55% more likely to be retweeted than those that did not, contributing to the likelihood of the festival trending and a general feeling of buy-it-now necessity. Elsewhere, the movement of festivals towards app-based promotion may be driven by our increasing dependence on mobile devices – something that brands and events could take further if data around the growth of mobile is to believed: according to Harvard Business Review, mobile ad budgets in the US are expected to increase from $2.3bn in 2012 to almost $11bn in 2016.

While I am totally sympathetic to the pressures of a swollen and sometimes struggling industry, this kind of approach doesn’t really appeal to me. Perhaps it’s the thrill of the chase that I’m averse to. Perhaps I’m just lazy. A little too old, or yearning for a bygone, rose-tinted time in which festivals were affiliated with freedom, silliness and lentil burgers rather than the looming importance of figures, stats and brand partnerships.

So at the risk of sounding like a luddite, I’d prefer the names of festival lineups delivered by more traditional methods. Not so much town criers or carrier pigeons, but something a little less difficult for someone who say, has a job or doesn’t fancy tweeting a selfie with the words “Billy Joel” scrawled across their forehead in lipstick. Even a fax would do.