Cropredy Festival 2025

Hello you lovely Cropredy-goers – and to those many of you who made the trip to our collective second home last August, a massive thank you.
We made it – it was squeaky-bum time like never before from a financial point of view right up until a few weeks ago when the dust all finally settled, but I know how many of you heeded our call to persuade a first-timer or two to come along and share the collective joy or to remind a friend who was perhaps so-so about the line-up to trust our judgement and ‘do the right thing’ – and it made the difference. Thank you again, as it means we can have another go.

We’re (just) on safe ground to plan next year in some detail: although the war chest has never looked so bare before. We have reserved what we need to keep the basic infrastructure in place and to pay deposits to our suppliers and the farmers whose fields we enjoy, but in common with all the other independent Festivals in the UK, we face a new and challenging future.

Over the last two summers over one hundred events either cancelled, failed or announced they were having their last hurrah as costs spiralled everywhere they looked and audiences dwindled. The entire landscape has changed with the Big Boys of the industry making their own rules. The major agents now tie their acts into ‘exclusivity’ deals and will no longer even take calls from minnows like us. Those who remember the kind of names we’ve been lucky to inveigle along in the past – Brian Wilson, Alice Cooper, CHIC and the like – will treasure those memories all the more.

However, we feel we know what works for our sector, and trust that you trust us to present a balanced programme of top turns, whether or not the names resonate in the wider ether.

What really matters though, is that for Cropredy 2025, we need to change and reset some fundamentals. We must scale back, simplify and slim down. If this new model works, then we can rebuild and hopefully begin to grow again, but the model which has worked up to now is no longer supportable. This is the way we’re going to go.

The licenced attendance for the festival has always been limited to 20,000. There have been several years when we reached that limit. But that limit has never been just ticket-buyers, as it must include everyone present – all the kids, the site crew, stewards, technicians, traders, musicians and not forgetting Boot and his incredible team who tirelessly clean the loos. Even us in the band!

And whether we sell anything like that number, we’re committed to the accommodation of that number of people: this includes campsites, showers, toilet facilities, safe and secure access routes, security, post-festival clean up and so on. With this in mind, for Cropredy 2025, we’re going to limit the number of paid tickets to six and a half thousand. If this number seems radical and random, please remember we only arrived at it after long and careful modelling and using the experience gathered from making the event work for decades.

The only difference this will make will be the need to book early to be sure of getting your ticket. As they say in the supermarkets, “when they’re gone they’re gone”.

We could describe it as downsizing, but in reality it’s “right-sizing”, certainly for 2025.