Brit Beat: Metallica Brings Download Festival First Ever Sell-Out; Tap Music Gears Up for Eurovision; Ben Cook’s Return Sparks Controversy

variety.com:

Mark Sutherland Things are looking up for Download Festival. The hard rock and metal event will celebrate its 20th anniversary edition this year with its first-ever sell-out.

The fest’s promoter, Andy Copping of Live Nation, confirms that all the weekend tickets and Saturday day tickets for this year’s 90,000-capacity festival have been snapped up, with the final remaining day tickets expected to sell out in the next few days. “We’ve done some big numbers in the past,” says Copping, speaking exclusively to Variety. “But this one has been a complete other level.

The festival running for 20 years and hitting that landmark sell-out figure is incredible.” In contrast, Copping says sales for 2022’s event – which featured a line-up largely first announced pre-pandemic in October 2019 after two years without a full-scale festival – had been “borderline sluggish” until a late surge in the last few weeks on sale.

But he says that an ultimately successful first post-COVID event, combined with a revamped marketing campaign, helped boost demand as soon as the extended four-day festival for 2023, being held June 8-11, was announced. “We saw this huge uptake in early bird tickets –and when I say huge, I mean huge,” he says. “We ended up doing 35,000 before we’d even announced a band – that’s unheard of.