Sometime in 2010, in my twenties, a Canadian HR manager tried to convince me that I’d find the meaning of life in the Nevada desert. She was a ‘Burner’, and Burning Man festival was the solution. There were ski goggles, silly hats, experimental music, and a black cat called Moop, named after the festival’s matter-out-of-place principle. I ran a mile after the cringeworthy group hug sessions and drunken lectures to take my rubbish home with me. I was and remain too English to belong to this particular group identity.

Yet the Burners may have been onto something: they felt that a festival is a vessel for identity, something to join rather than simply attend. While most festivals have tried to copy Burning Man, many of them are now in trouble.

Most recently, this summer’s Womad Glasgow was cancelled. It was set to be the first Scottish edition of Peter Gabriel’s world-music festival, but sold too few of its £145 tickets to go ahead. It joins a list kept by the Association of Independent Festivals of 20 cancellations or postponements so far this year. Womad’s trouble was partly geography: a festival frequented by people who live in the South of England, that has now moved too far away. The usual suspects are also blamed: big corporate beasts suffocating the little guy, and the fees that some musicians charge. But is this really the death of music festivals?

Not exactly. The numbers show a bubble deflating after Covid, with 43 closures in 2025 and 78 the year before, the slow unwinding of a glut funded by cheap money and more disposable income. Even if it’s just a correction, something is still being lost. A festival used to be a simple thing: a field, a sound system, a love of a subculture, and a few thousand strangers misbehaving. It did not need to have grand ideas. That was rather the point.

Slowly, however, they have acquired lofty visions — and a price tag to match. When Rage Against The Machine headlined at Coachella in 1999, tickets cost $50 and the band returned half their fee to help the organisers out. Then the need for more money immediately led to the introduction of VIP tickets. Perhaps desperate for relevance while the audience preened, this year The Strokes showed a video montage of US bombings in Iran, a year after Kneecap used their set to call for a “free Palestine”. Coachella tickets now cost $650.

Similarly in the UK, Glastonbury (£375) started as a rock festival but is now mostly pop for middle-class people who want to muck in for a weekend, but at least the wellies serve a practical purpose. Meanwhile, Mighty Hoopla (£160) in Brockwell Park is seen as the ‘gay Glastonbury’, and everyone wears gold or silver lamé shorts.

The decline of Burning Man ($550) shows where this road ends. What began in 1986 as a beach bonfire with no rules or brand guidelines was ruined by guardrails. The original free-spirited principles of the Burner community became bureaucratised, and what was casual and spontaneous became a prescription. Last year the festival made a loss.

Womad and the 19 other casualties this year were never as big as some of those famous festivals, but they all suffer from similar problems: an obsession with planning led by outward appearances, the politicisation of everything, the demands of modern laws and regulations, residents getting better at blocking events, and a changing wider culture.

It’s not that it’s good that some festivals are closing, or that organisers are losing money. Their retreat shows how culture has shrunk. What we should return to is smaller, more nimble, unbranded, and perhaps more lawless occasions.