Isle of Wight pageant will increase earnings regardless of fall in attendance

[ad_1] Pet Store Boys and The Prodigy helped the Isle of Wight music pageant improve its earnings final yr, producing a £2.6m dividend for its mum or dad firm, a division of the occasions trade’s greatest participant, Dwell Nation.

In a yr when many smaller music festivals misplaced cash or have been cancelled amid moist climate and hovering prices, the summer season showpiece on the island, a ferry journey throughout the Solent from England’s southern coast, managed to prosper.

Regardless of a 4.5% decline in attendance to only underneath 144,000, the 2024 pageant made a revenue of £3.4m. That was a rise from £2.8m the yr earlier than, when Pulp and The Chemical Brothers headlined the Friday and Saturday evening lineups.

The 2026 headliners shall be The Treatment, Lewis Capaldi and Calvin Harris, organisers introduced on Monday.

The pageant started in 1968 and achieved worldwide fame – and notoriety – two years later when an estimated 600,000 folks descended on an island whose everlasting inhabitants numbered simply 100,000.

The 1970 lineup featured the Who, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Jethro Tull and Sly and the Household Stone, in addition to a set by Jimi Hendrix simply weeks earlier than his loss of life, by which he performed a closely distorted model of God Save the Queen.

One of many attenders that yr was John Giddings, who has run the pageant since 2002. Since 2017 the pageant has been a part of a sprawling company community of UK reside music occasions all finally owned by the huge and typically controversial US occasions and ticketing enterprise Dwell Nation.

Accounts filed at Corporations Home present that Isle of Wight Competition Ltd paid a £2.6m dividend, up from £1.9m in 2023, to its quick mum or dad, UK Competition Holdings Ltd, a holding firm that additionally runs festivals similar to Studying.

That firm is just too small to publish detailed accounts. The agency instantly above it within the possession chain, LN-Gaiety Holdings Ltd, is a conduit for dividends from Dwell Nation’s UK occasions. LN-Gaiety Holdings has reported almost £34m in dividend earnings over the previous two years for which accounts can be found.

In 2023 it paid out almost £49m in dividends to LNGH Eire Ltd, a holding firm in Eire, the place company tax charges are decrease than within the UK.

Los Angeles-based Dwell Nation, which additionally owns Ticketmaster, purchased the Isle of Wight pageant in 2017 throughout a interval of growth. The Competitors and Markets Authority (CMA) cleared the deal, saying the occasion was not a rival to the corporate’s portfolio of about 20 UK festivals together with Studying, Leeds and Obtain.

Dwell Nation is dealing with a lawsuit within the US for allegedly permitting ticket touts to make hundreds of thousands of {dollars} at followers’ expense. It's also the topic of authorized motion from the US division of justice over an alleged dominance of the reside occasions trade that “suffocates” competitors on the expense of followers.

Within the UK, the competitors watchdog has compelled Dwell Nation’s subsidiary Ticketmaster to alter the way it advertises live performance tickets, together with ending “deceptive” details about the seats they're shopping for, after a fan backlash over its dealing with of the Oasis reunion tour.