Isle of Wight festival increases profits despite fall in attendance | Music industry

Pet Shop Boys and The Prodigy helped the Isle of Wight music festival increase its profits last year, generating a £2.6m dividend for its parent company, a division of the events industry’s biggest player, Live Nation.

In a year when many smaller music festivals lost money or were cancelled amid wet weather and soaring costs, the summer showpiece on the island, a ferry ride across the Solent from England’s southern coast, managed to prosper.

Despite a 4.5% decline in attendance to just under 144,000, the 2024 festival made a profit of £3.4m. That was an increase from £2.8m the year before, when Pulp and The Chemical Brothers headlined the Friday and Saturday night lineups.

The 2026 headliners will be The Cure, Lewis Capaldi and Calvin Harris, organisers announced on Monday.

The festival began in 1968 and achieved worldwide fame – and notoriety – two years later when an estimated 600,000 people descended on an island whose permanent population numbered just 100,000.

The 1970 lineup featured the Who, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Jethro Tull and Sly and the Family Stone, as well as a set by Jimi Hendrix just weeks before his death, in which he played a heavily distorted version of God Save the Queen.

One of the attenders that year was John Giddings, who has run the festival since 2002. Since 2017 the festival has been part of a sprawling corporate network of UK live music events all ultimately owned by the vast and sometimes controversial US events and ticketing business Live Nation.

Accounts filed at Companies House show that Isle of Wight Festival Ltd paid a £2.6m dividend, up from £1.9m in 2023, to its immediate parent, UK Festival Holdings Ltd, a holding company that also runs festivals such as Reading.

That company is too small to publish detailed accounts. The firm immediately above it in the ownership chain, LN-Gaiety Holdings Ltd, is a conduit for dividends from Live Nation’s UK events. LN-Gaiety Holdings has reported nearly £34m in dividend income over the past two years for which accounts are available.

In 2023 it paid out nearly £49m in dividends to LNGH Ireland Ltd, a holding company in Ireland, where corporation tax rates are lower than in the UK.

Los Angeles-based Live Nation, which also owns Ticketmaster, bought the Isle of Wight festival in 2017 during a period of expansion. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) cleared the deal, saying the event was not a rival to the company’s portfolio of about 20 UK festivals including Reading, Leeds and Download.

Live Nation is facing a lawsuit in the US for allegedly allowing ticket touts to make millions of dollars at fans’ expense. It is also the subject of legal action from the US department of justice over an alleged dominance of the live events industry that “suffocates” competition at the expense of fans.

In the UK, the competition watchdog has forced Live Nation’s subsidiary Ticketmaster to change how it advertises concert tickets, including ending “misleading” information about the seats they are buying, after a fan backlash over its handling of the Oasis reunion tour.