Music festivals are going live again

Homegrown music festivals are making a grand comeback in the post-Covid era, with a renewed focus on community and sustainability 

Lush Ziro Valley, nestled in the gentle hills of Arunachal Pradesh, reverberated with music again after three years this September. Popular since its start in 2012, the Ziro Festival of Music made a grand comeback from the Covid-19 hiatus of 2020 and 2021 as it hosted nearly 10,000 people from September 29 to October 2.

The footfall was an improvement on the pre-Covid figure of 8,000 in 2019. The fact that the festival managed to pull in the crowds even as its venue is located in the eastern-most state of India, and 123km from the nearest civilian airport, painted a bigger picture — music festivals are back, and they are drawing more people than ever before.

The Lollapalooza franchise of music festivals, which originated in Chicago and now takes place in Berlin, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Stockholm and Paris, will be entering India with a multi-genre show at Mumbai’s Mahalakshmi Race Course on January 28 and 29. The line-up promises acts like Imagine Dragons, Diplo, The Strokes, AP Dhillon, Divine and Prateek Kuhad to name a few. “The inaugural Lollapalooza India will be open to over 60,000 fans across both days,” says Ashish Hemrajani, the founder and CEO of BookMyShow, one of the promoters.

Tickets for the event, which will have four stages, range from ₹8,900 to ₹64,999. For Hemrajani, the event will be the first step towards putting India on the global map of live entertainment and offering an equal, global opportunity to Indian artists. “Over the past three decades, Lollapalooza has chosen its destinations based on market readiness, audience interest; today, India is truly ready for a global music festival of this legacy and scale,” he says.

While the limited early-bird ticket inventory for Lollapalooza was sold out in less than 36 hours, the organisers of Sunburn — a Percept Intellectual Property, positioned as ‘Asia’s Premiere Electronic Dance Music (EDM) Festival’ — say they are confident of re-establishing the annual event in Goa as Asia’s largest music festival. Sunburn was organised on a smaller scale in December last year, but the full-fledged festival, to be hosted from December 28 to 30, is returning after three years. “We do not reveal exact ticket sale numbers. The tickets for the festival start from ₹6,000 for a season pass and ₹3,000 per day,” says Karan Singh, who manages the festival with a 15-member team, in an emailed interview.

The promise of this year bringing back music festivals finds weight in the response to Magnetic Fields 2022, a contemporary arts and music festival to be hosted in the semi-desert environs of Rajasthan’s 17th-century fort Alsisar Mahal from December 9 to 11.

All 4,000 tickets for the eighth edition of the festival, which is returning after a Covid-19 hiatus too, have been sold, according to the organiser’s website. Tickets started at ₹12,500 and went up to ₹1.1 lakh.