The Wall Street Journal, in its survey of the onslaught of music festivals coming online this summer ($), has some interesting facts and figures. To wit:

• There are […] some powerful new business players emerging on the festival scene—bands themselves. Coldplay is taking a cut of the revenue at the new Pemberton Festival. The band’s manager is a major investor in the festival and helped select the location in British Columbia. At Stagecoach, a country-music festival in its second year in California, the Eagles were promised a percentage of the festival’s ticket sales and merchandise in addition to the group’s performance fee, according to someone familiar with the deal.
• Last year, 80,000 people attended the Bonnaroo festival in rural Tennessee, which featured the reunited Police as one of its marquee acts. The event grossed $16.8 million in ticket sales (up from $14.7 million the year before), not including revenue from concessions, merchandise and sponsors, according to Billboard magazine.
• A band can often command more than its usual fee for a festival gig—$1 million or more for headliners—in part because organizers are paying a premium to get a special performance instead of being a stop on a tour.
• A growing emphasis on mainstream headliners accompanies some shifts in the makeup of festival audiences. At Lollapalooza in Chicago, for instance, 35- to 64-year-olds accounted for 20% of ticket buyers last year, up from 16% the year before. The broader demographic mix helps festivals attract crucial sponsorship dollars. North American companies are projected to spend $1.04 billion to sponsor music events this year, up from $867 million in 2006, with festivals attracting a growing share, according to the IEG Sponsorship Report.

I personally don’t understand the economics underlying these; there are just a few $1M-a-performance folks out there, and most of them, like the Police or the Eagles, can make a lot more than that from one gig in most big cities. I suppose there’s some marketing benefits, for an oldster band like the Police, for example, playing at a hip festival. But I also suspect most of the lesser bands on the bill aren’t making as much as they would from a local show; presumably, again, there’s the opportunity to play in front of a larger audience, even one spread out over dozens of acres on a field.

Which is its own problem; these fests, relentlessly romanticized in the press, are horrible places to see any band perform. Grant Park in Chicago, where Lollapalooza now encamps, is just across the street from the Loop, so amenities aren’t that far away, and Chicago knows how to handle crowds. Kids love Bonaroo of course, and I don’t know of too many problems from there, but when I see the words “rural Tennesee” and “80,000 people” in the same sentence, I cringe.

As for Pemberton, well, it seems to be a few hours north of Vancouver, which is to say a few hours away from human habitation. (If you’re driving, just head north on rte. 99, past “Furry Creek” and “Squamish.”) Remoteness makes for cheap real estate for such fests, but it also creates miles-long traffic backups, iffy amenities, and, most importantly, not much in the way of governmental oversight, which is of course a big drag, man …

… until kids start burning, looting and raping. Generally, nothing horrifically bad happens at these fests, until it does, as the carnage from Woodstock ‘99 attests.

Worse is the stuff that just is taken for granted, stuff like this, reported by my former colleague Jeff Stark from that show:

Irresponsible: There’s no other word for Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst. He’s goading the crowd, pumping them up, higher and higher. It’s beyond working them into enjoying the show. He’s encouraging the pit, working them into a frenzy. He wants people to “smash stuff.” “C’mon y’all, c’mon y’all,” he shouts. Below him, the pit is a war zone, a sweaty, dirty, roiling mass of vicious guys knocking the fuck out of one another. It’s not a fun scene. It’s nasty, and people are getting hurt—bad. Bodies on cardboard stretchers emerge from the audience a couple of times per song.

After the last metal-rap hybrid song, the MC comes up onstage to make an announcement. “Please, there are people hurt out there,” he pleads. “They are your brothers and sisters. They are under the towers. Please, help the medical team get them out of there. We can’t continue the show until we get these dear people out of there. We have a really serious situation out there.”

A few minutes later, the crowd parts. The kids are hauled off. Tomorrow, at the morning press conference, the staff will announce that 10 people were taken away in ambulances with head injuries. I’m shocked that no one died.

Rock rejuvenates itself so quickly that its collective memory is six or eight weeks at this point. If one of these new fests—one of which, sooner or later, is going to be turned out to be run by folks without the obvious smarts of your Coachellas and Bonaroos—is Woodstock ‘99 revisited, we’ll see the appeal of the fests quickly wane. For another few years, at least.