This past Sunday, the sun set on Worthy Farm, Somerset and brought Glastonbury Festival’s 2025 edition to a close. That night, Olivia Rodrigo captivated an enormous crowd with what many festival-goers are calling one of the standout sets of the weekend. At just 22 years old, she appeared a natural far beyond her years and truly took the stage by storm.
But Glastonbury is more than just a music festival. It is a city, a lifestyle, the “best place on earth.” The 1,100-acre site draws around a quarter of a million people to the south-west of England year after year (except when the fields are left to recover). With wall-to-wall coverage across BBC channels for the five-day music marathon, a unique opportunity presents itself for headliners but more importantly, non-headliners. An opportunity for marketing.
The festival stage has long been a powerful platform for artists to showcase their talent to a wider audience, often reaching people who might never have discovered them otherwise. It is, in its own right, a marketing campaign (and sometimes it’s used for a political rant!)
Additionally, the coverage across all communication channels is almost impossible to buy. With a record-breaking 23.1 million viewers tuning in on TV in 2023, the potential for publicity is extraordinary, the sort of audience marketers can only dream of reaching for brand awareness campaigns.
However, in 2025, it was not Neil Young, The 1975 or even Charli XCX, all of whom were broadcast on the BBC last weekend, who gained the most talkability, press attention or social media traction after Glastonbury.
Enter Kneecap. You surely know who they are. The Irish rap trio received not a single second of radio, digital or TV coverage from the BBC for their set, despite thousands of supporters flooding to the West Holts Stage to see them perform.
As festival-goers’ phones buzzed with alerts from the Glastonbury app, encouraging them to head elsewhere due to overcrowding, the West Belfast group took to the stage.
Keir Starmer had called for the group to be removed from the line-up entirely in the lead-up to the event because of their political views. Yet, this did not deter them. A sea of tricolours and Palestinian flags filled the Somerset fields, but none of it was broadcast.
So why mention this? It highlights the beauty of the new age of marketing: sometimes it simply happens. Anyone on social media or reading festival coverage in the press will have struggled to avoid seeing Kneecap’s name, despite them NOT benefiting from the official publicity and national media exposure.
On this side of the pond, Kneecap were announced to be playing the Irish Glasto equivalent, Electric Picnic. As RTÉ have decided against broadcasting any of the festival on TV, they will luckily not be met with the headache and speculation that will they, won’t they, broadcast the Kneecap set? And breathe…..
But really, who received the most coverage?
