Last weekend, Zhangbei hosted the 3rd installment of their InMusic Festival. We’ve been somewhat scathing of the festival to date, citing poor artist facilities and general disorganization, but we are more than happy to be proved wrong: where we thought that the difficulties associated with getting to and from the grasslands and of course the lack of customer facing facilities would eventuate in the festival fading away, this year’s heavily Beijing-centric lineup seems to have brought the masses. We weren’t there this year unfortunately, but we’ve heard from several sources that there were between 50-100,000 people up in Hebei for the weekend, with perhaps 40,000 tickets sold.
If it’s a review you’re after, then James Tiscione does a great job over at the Global Times – his review veers from praise to irritation and back again, but the key for us is encapsulated in the conclusion:
Overall, Zhangbei had somewhat cleaned up it’s act – the grass was longer thanks to recent rains, organizers offered a huge food court that was mostly chuanr, 10-yuan beer, and squadrons of young volunteers trying to pick up after careless fans. But the music, and the passion it awoke, is what distinguished this year’s Zhangbei.
It seems that the festival organizers concentrated more on marketing the event to the Hebei massive, rather than trying to get Beijingers to leave the comfort of their city and the strategy certainly seemed to work. Let’s hope for more success stories as some festivals reach a kind of maturity…