• 
  Overall static year, with figures slightly exceeding 2011
• Tail doubled in length, with a 32% increase in ticket sales 

London:- Leading ticketing company WeGotTickets has distilled the figures of the over 700 festivals that it provides ticketing for to produce some surprising findings – despite a considerable number of cancellations and festivals taking a year off, the sector, from WeGotTickets’ perspective, held its own in 2012.

WeGotTickets sold the same number of tickets for the top selling festivals as last year but worked harder through their marketing channels to do so. The company speculate that they got a bigger share of a smaller pie as those top festivals generally sold less overall tickets or sold out later. Breaking down the top tiers, the top 10 festivals were up 22% on 2011, top 20 up 10% and top 30 doing the same. 

The marketing channels that WeGotTickets used to promote its festivals included three mailshots to its entire database in the lead up to festival season and regionally targeted mail shots done individually for their top 50-60 festivals.  The festival portal WeGotFestivals.com, new in 2012, social media and Spotify playlists were also used to aid fans in the discovery of festivals. 

There were also double the amount of smaller festivals on the ticketing company’s books this year ranging from spoken word, food and drink, comedy and arts festivals all the way through to the ubiquitous new music festival. This meant that the tail – those festivals outside the WeGotTickets’ top 100 sellers - was up by 32% in terms of sales and double in length, with many of the new festivals on their books selling in small numbers. 

One can’t ignore however that this was a difficult year for some. WeGotTickets itself had 12 official cancellations,half of them new to the company, and the Olympics no doubt played a part in the falling sales of some of the festivals.

Said Dave Newton, Co-founder, WeGotTickets “This has been a challenging year for much of the festival industry, but we’ve worked hard to combat this through engaging with our festival fans. By next festival season the WeGotTickets customer base will have grown by a further 1Ž4 of a million offering a very diverse audience for our festival clients to market to.”