25-52, preferably no festivals.
Festivals are the illness, the
plague, of our times. I loathe them, they're not designed for people who want to hear music. The worst thing is often bands only play the festival because of the great 'promotional opportunity' to show themselves to the audience that doesn't know them. Fine, but wouldn't it be nice to serve the people who do know them as well? I don't like hanging around in the open, either rainy or otherwise burning, air with 20.000-40.000 people that are drunk and/or 'having a good time' with expensive drinks tired/hung-over of the previous 2 days and showing little to none interest to the bad mix that the wind sometimes blows in their direction.
An example: this year Electric Masada and King Crimson played on North Sea Jazz. Of course they were spread over 2 days (and I'm sure that
if they played on the same day, they would've played at the same time on different stages). Whilst King Crimson was playing the only other really good act was playing on another stage. The next day, the Electric Masada day,
nothing worthwhile was playing the whole day. That would've been well over 100 euro's for 2 hours of great music and maybe one hour of interesting other stuff...
Will this 'bigger, longer, more...' thing ever stop? Every weekend in summer seems to be filled with festivals these days. And then they start to complain it isn't sold out?!?!?!?
[/rant]