"That was as good as it gets," said Lionel Richie to Jo Whiley in an interview after his set at Glastonbury 2015, "it was the perfect show."
Each year 160,000 people descend on Glastonbury, creating a temporary community with a shared love of music. Since its humble beginnings in 1970 with 1500 tickets at £1 a pop which included free milk, the festival has grown each year. Today it is astonishing in its scale. Over the course of the weekend, the festival site boasts a larger population than the city of Sunderland. It is huge. And so too is the expectation of our audience. They consume more programming than ever before, via mobile phones, tablets, laptops, digital radio as well as the tried and trusted live TV and Radio.
Overall, the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage offered audiences live music from around 100 different artists with around 250 hours of coverage across BBC TV, Radio, Red Button and online over the weekend, many hours of which is still available to view via bbc.co.uk/glastonbury. It’s no simple task to record, film and stream performances from six different stages, spread across a huge site with limited permanent infrastructure – and weather!
And 2015 was a Glastonbury to remember. Approximately 18.5m people, nearly one in three of the UK population, watched our content this year, with the biggest hit of the weekend being Lionel Richie on Sunday afternoon. His genuine joy and amazement when looking out to a rapturous audience of tens of thousands, unsurprisingly gained the biggest peak TV audience of the whole festival, 4.32m on BBC Two. Following his appearance, Lionel’s album is now at number one, with Florence and the Machine in second place, and surprise performer on the BBC Introducing Stage, James Bay, is now at number 3 in the UK Top 40 Album Chart – all testament to their incredible performances.
TV audiences on BBC Two for all three Pyramid Stage headline sets rose year on year, with Florence and the Machine gaining an average audience of 574 000, Kanye West reaching an average audience of 1.05m and The Who gaining an average audience of 798 000. Paloma Faith gave BBC Four its fourth highest audience figure of the year to date, gaining an average of 808 000 viewers.
The real story of the weekend is the changing viewing habits of our audience who consume our content in new ways. A record breaking 4.0m UK Unique Browsers accessed the BBC’s Glastonbury online pages over the festival week (Friday – Thursday), an impressive 37% increase on last year. Approximately 4.52m viewers watched via Red Button over the weekend, up an even more impressive 41% compared to last year.
There was also a record weekly reach to our Glastonbury pages accessed via mobile phones, which for the first time reached 1.0m, up 162% compared to 2014. Clips on YouTube have totalled 1.14m global views to date, proving that the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage is a worldwide hit. We estimate, looking at RAJAR data, that around 12m listeners heard Glastonbury coverage at some point between Friday to Sunday.
Of course, offering this level of coverage takes resource and this year a team of 324 staff and freelancers - about the same as 2014 - worked round the clock alongside our BBC presenters to produce the best musical experience possible for our audiences. They’re essential roles in getting the show on air and online - laying cables, rigging lights, manning cameras, working late shifts to keep broadcasting on air, editing content and managing huge technical difficulty in setting up a temporary broadcast structure in the middle of a farm of fields.
A few people have asked me during the past 10 days – is there too much Glastonbury on the BBC? I ask them if they watched 87 year old Burt Bacharach perform modern day classics including ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head’, or the crowd’s reaction to ‘My Generation’ by The Who, or Mark Ronson’s superstar rendition of 'Uptown Funk'. Glastonbury is the event that brings the nation together for the love of music across the generations.
Jo Whiley interviewed Lionel Richie on BBC Two after his performance, and his reaction summed up the weekend: “That was as good as it gets… that was organised chaos at its best, karaoke at its finest… I saw a grandmother standing next to her grandson, and the grandma was out of control! It was the perfect show."
Bob Shennan is Director, BBC Music
- Watch videos from over 90 Glastonbury sets on the dedicated Glastonbury website.
