Virtual Glastonbury parties on

Although legal hitches stymied Britain’s most well-known festival this year, Virtual Glastonbury aimed to capture the atmosphere and stream the ‘Worthy Farm spirit’ of the festival over the internet – minus the mud and smelly toilets.

The virtual music festival, which ran from 22-24 June, generated more than two million page views during its three-day extravaganza while simultaneously boosting retail sales and membership numbers for Playlouder, the streaming media company which housed the event on its website.

Playlouder teamed up with Glastonbury promoters to produce both exclusive and archive footage of groups including Gorillaz, Basement Jaxx and Stereophonics. Unsurprisingly, Virtual Glastonbury, hosted on the playloader.com site, faced a surge in traffic from music fans worldwide curious to see live audio-visual footage of their favourite bands and to get a flavour of the whole Glastonbury experience.

The comedy tent, for example, featured showings from The League of Gentlemen, The Fast Show and Alan Partridge, while the Dance Tent shook to the beats of Timo Maas, Lemon Jelly and Mark Rae. Visitors could also roam the Main and Pyramid Stages, the Green and HealingFields, plus take part in online chats and read interviews online. In addition to the exclusive live footage, archived appearances from Coldplay, Blur, REM, Travis and Orbital were also available.

Paul Hitchman, Playlouder MD, said the success of this event – which claimed to be the world’s first ever virtual festival – illustrates a growing demand from the global public for interactive access to live musical performances. In fact, Playlouder discovered that half of the traffic that logged onto the festival came from the US. ‘This has attracted a huge amount of interest. We have been overwhelmed by the phenomenal response to our idea which shows the huge popularity of Glastonbury over the world,’ he said.

By teaming up with a name such as Glastonbury, which it has now done for the second year running, Playlouder aimed to build brand awareness and trust amongst its users. ‘Glastonbury is known around the world for its integrity and its community fits well with the Playlouder brand. This was all about boosting our profile amongst music fans, driving traffic to the site, and establishing Playlouder as a dominant brand in the digital music marketplace,’ Hitchman added.

While he admitted the site faced a boost in music sales during the event (although figures have not yet been released), Hitchman said the main objective behind producing the event was to boost its membership, which would have a knock-on effect on sales later down the line. The company’s business model, which is based on advertising, sales and digital downloads, and content syndication deal revenue, undoubtedly relies on building a strong user base in order to survive.

Hitchman would not say how many new members signed up during the festival, or how many members the service has in total, but said that it is in the ‘many thousands’. He claimed the event ran without any technical hitches, that user feedback has been fantastic, and that Playlouder has been approached by other festivals since this time to discuss future webcast ventures. More details will soon be announced.

So what does the Glastonbury festival get out of the deal? Given that the event did not open this year, this was an opportunity to keep up its global profile and mark new territory on the web, said Glastonbury spokesperson Dick Vernon. ‘We have to recognise that one of the things we have to do is develop our relationship with the concept of virtual festivals. We need to have someother form of outlet so that people can have greater involvement, giving better satisfaction,’ he said. ‘Last year, for the first time, we did some webcasts on the site with Playlouder and were hoping to extend it. Because we weren’t actually opening this year, we were in the position to include some archive footage and provide some new footage to put on the web.’

The popularity of watching live gigs from the comfort of your own home was illustrated earlier in the year when MSN ran a live performance of Paul McCartney at the Cavern Club, which attracted three million online viewers. This performance was later blown out of the water with the Madonna gig at Brixton Academy, also shown live on MSN, which was watched by more than nine million people worldwide. Virtual Glastonbury was produced together with Virtue TV and promoted by MSN again. It seems that virtual festivals might just take off, and, if they do, Microsoft will surely be there!