Remember, Music Isn’t Made at Festivals — It’s Sold There (Along With Your Consumer Data)

SAF
Sep 5
2 min read

Festivals love to pretend they’re the beating heart of music culture.

“This is where memories are made, where sounds are born, where the future of music is shaped.”

Cute story. But let’s be clear: music isn’t made at festivals. It’s sold there.

The tracks you’re losing your mind to at 3 a.m.?

They were written months, maybe years ago — in dim studios, in bedrooms with blown-out monitors, by producers who will never see a fraction of the money you just dropped on a wristband.

Festivals don’t create music; they curate and package it, slap it between overpriced bar tabs and food trucks, and sell it back to you as an “experience.” And here’s the kicker: it’s not just the music being sold.

It’s you.

Every wristband, every RFID scan, every cashless payment, every app login is logged, analyzed, and monetized.

Your drinking habits, your movement patterns, even how long you stood at Stage B before wandering off to the toilets — all of it is valuable consumer data.

The same infrastructure that gives you “seamless entry” is also giving corporate partners a behavioral profile of how you party.

Festivals aren’t cathedrals of music, they’re shopping malls with better lighting.

Anti - Festival Drop

The real art was made far away, in isolation, in struggle, in joy — long before the stages were built and the sponsors were signed.

What festivals do is take that art, frame it in their branding, and sell you the idea that this is where culture happens. But behind the dust, glitter, and pyrotechnics, what’s really happening is data extraction.