Festivals Go Online

In the ever-increasing cross-pollination between real events and their online doppelgängers, music festivals have made leaps and bounds in their attempts to integrate actual shows with the interactive tools of new media.

One such example is Playstation’s 3Rooms, a 9m sq cube that appeared at this month’s Manchester International Festival. The conspicuous metal box contained a veritable laboratory of high-tech, aesthetically pleasing equipment operated by a host of net-savvy students - “the cream of local art and film schools and universities” - all of whom worked towards making the festival more than just a few days of good music.

The purpose of the cube, The Telegraph reports, is, in the words of sponsorship manager Carl Christopher, to:

“use elements of the main festival to help us create a mini-festival within it”. This entailed dispatching teams to each event - Damon Albarn’s Chinese circus show, Monkey, gigs by Lou Reed and Kanye West, Heston Blumenthal’s taste-a-thon and so on - to capture footage to turn into vodcasts, mini-documentaries and animated films.

So what does 3Rooms mean for the future of festivals?

The answer, in part, is that 3Rooms is a response to the changing nature of festivals: as the events become increasingly digitised and interactive, so must the marketers who target them.

Today’s festival doesn’t begin and end standing in a muddy field watching the Arctic Monkeys or, in the case of the Manchester International Festival, sitting in the Palace Theatre rapt at Monkey’s kung-fu routines.

It can begin on festival websites and forums months in advance, as online communities discuss their favourite bands, and make friends and travel arrangements. It peaks during the event itself as people post blogs and upload pictures - while those at home watch live concert streams - then continues afterwards online: hunting clips on YouTube; downloading live snippets from iTunes; regaling Pete Doherty’s latest antics on the forums.

The Telegraph: The festivals that came out of the field and onto the web