Smells like middle-aged spirit

TO JUDGE by the crowds making their way to Glastonbury Festival on June 24th, it is a good time to be in the music industry. This week nearly 200,000 revellers set up camp across several fields in Somerset, where the festival has been held nearly every year since it first started as a small, hippyish event in 1970. Now hundreds of live bands and DJs will perform on 90 stages over five days. Each punter pays £225 ($353) for the experience, which, thanks to the damp British weather, tends to be a muddy one.

Glastonbury is perhaps the most striking example in Britain of how big music festivals are booming. But as the demand for festivals becomes ever greater, a potential supply-side problem has started to become apparent. It hints at how the music industry has changed rapidly over the past ten years, and how it may need to adapt.