France’s top music festivals attracted their highest combined attendance in the last five years in 2016, despite the threat of terror and the competing attraction of Uefa Euro 2016.
Some 3.5m music fans attended the country’s 30 biggest festivals according to the latest annual analysis released by SocialBand. That was an 11 per cent increase on 2015 figures.
Les Vieilles Charrues, in Britanny, and the two-week Jazz festival in Marciac saw an attendance in excess of 250,000. The Solidays, Jazz à Vienne and Festival de Carcassonne events all attracted more than 200,000 attendees. The smallest of the top 30 attracted 55,000 people.
SocialBand found that more than 75 per cent of the top 30 increased attendance, with seven seeing a decline. Interestingly, eight festivals had more Facebook fans than spectators, compared to five in 2015.
The growth came in the wake of the Bataclan massacre in November 2015, when 89 people were killed at an Eagles of Death Metal concert in Paris. France has been in a state of emergency ever since the November 13 attacks in the capital.
More than 2.4m tickets were sold for last summer’s Uefa Euro 2016 football tournament, which was held in 10 cities across France.
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