Joyful woman at a festival, wearing a pink crochet top and adorned with sunflower in hair, smiling and posing playfully among a crowd.

Social Ticketing: Boom Festival Case Study (PT)

Social Ticketing

Keeping festival tickets affordable is a most pressing challenge for festival promoters at the moment. Rising production costs also lead to rising ticket prices, but expensive tickets exclude fans from weaker economic backgrounds. So, how can festival promoters keep culture accessible for as many people as possible? 

Boom Festival has been using their own social ticketing system since the early 2000s. The festival takes place every two years, with visitors from 169 nations. Having people from so many different countries made it mandatory for the festival to take different economic realities into consideration from the start, explained co-director Artur Mendes. Boom wants to grant low-threshold access to culture for people in countries that are really struggling and to low-income groups like students. About the festivals’ motivation, Mendes says: “It was a political statement but at the same time we could see the economic situation of people deteriorate.”  

Thus, Boom Festival started offering two types of tickets: 90% are regular-priced tickets for people from financially stable countries, and 10% are friendly-priced tickets for countries with signs of development. In 2023, a regular ticket costs €275, a friendly ticket costs €200. In addition, the festival gives away 500 free tickets to the residents of a guest country which they choose for each edition based on factors like how far the festival culture is developed in the country and how Boom can foster this development.

The friendly-price countries are determined based on objective, economic criteria like minimum wage per country and GDP per capita. In these countries, Boom Festival has special ambassadors. To buy a ticket, the nationals and residents of the countries must contact the ambassador, apply for a ticket, and prove to them that they live in the country.

Boom is a festival without corporate sponsors, relying on support from their audience that allows them to be fully independent. This system works well for them. “What enables us to offer reduced and free tickets is a thorough business model that allows this revenue to be balanced with other incomes like tickets, bar sales, renting of food vendor stalls,” Mendes states. 

A holistic eco-systemic approach

The friendly tickets are a part of Boom’s radical transparency approach. Boom makes public how much they pay for what and where they make how much money. Parts of their income are given to the local community. Social ticketing is just a part of this “interdependent eco-systemic approach,” Mendes mentions. If people are more interested in creating value for shareholders, it becomes difficult to maintain this balance, but according to Mendes, in theory it can work for everyone. Either way, the guests seem to appreciate Boom’s measures: every edition since 2014 has been sold out before the line-up announcements.

Find out more about Boom’s social awareness initiatives here and more about their pioneering sustainability work here.