These countries have the most music festivals

william osborne says:

If it were classical music festivals, I suspect the USA would rank far lower.

Jonathon says:

I take it this is not including classical music festivals? France has between 6 to 8 thousand festivals a year. You can check their own statistics on the matter. https://metiers.philharmoniedeparis.fr/festivals.aspx#frame-1565

SVM says:

Their methodology for identifying and counting music festivals seems very unsound (it has the look of some monolingual anglophones spending a couple of hours searching on the web and making a spreadsheet of what they found). Several longstanding fixtures in the UK classical-music festival calendar are absent, such as Aldeburgh, Glyndebourne (unless that is denoted by “Lewes”, the nearest substantial urban area), Hatfield House, Huddersfield, and Leicester. Also, there seems to be some inconsistency in how to count related but distinct festivals — Cheltenham is counted as ‘2’ (presumably, one for the classical festival and one for the jazz festival), whilst “Edingburgh” [sic] is counted as ‘1’ (presumably, the EIF and the Fringe are being treated a single entity). And why does the paragraph on “major festivals” in the UK not mention the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, a festival that is far bigger than Glastonbury and the other named examples (much as I abhor how the BBC has wrecked the Proms since the departure of Roger Wright, there is no denying the enormity of that festival’s scale and reach)? Farther afield, they fail to mention Bayreuth, for an example of a really obvious omission.

More generally, we should be very suspicious when an English-language survey produces a database that happens to be dominated by anglophone countries (and countries in which fluent English speakers amount to a very significant percentage of the population, such as the Netherlands). To my mind, such a bias suggests strongly that the team of compilers lacks the foreign-language expertise to source comprehensive information about festivals in non-anglophone countries (you cannot rely on English-language web search results and databases alone).

AC says:

I’m a researcher in creative geography in Japan and there are at least 70 *major* classical music festivals held here each year (I have the full list). That’s not including other “college-level” music festivals (at least 40), smaller “amateur” festivals (at least 10), music festivals without “festival” in their titles (at least 10), and music festivals of other genres. This list is unreliable.

Doc Martin says:

That list is completely wrong. Ireland has > 300/year.

Someone has done a cut n paste job, without checking the data.