but the pandemic has brought forward that thinking. People are having to force innovation in hybrid events, virtual platforms and things like that. It’s not there yet, it’s still very much a patchwork of stuff out there. We aren’t quite at the sort of Ready Player One-level immersion, but we’ll get there, probably quicker than people think. There’s a lot of thinking going on in that space.”
SUCCESSION STORY Away from Insomnia, Player1’s CEO admits there have been a number of challenges for events in recent years, many of them related to recent and ongoing shocks to the economy. “Unfortunately, a lot of people have left the business, for a lot of reasons, so some of the people we used to work with are no longer there.” Being mainly freelancers, they understandably had to find other more stable work and leave events behind to support themselves. “They unfortunately fell through the cracks in the government support scheme,” laments Fletcher. “I had to help guide quite a few people during the pandemic, to help them navigate that.” Costs have also risen massively, as we are all finding
out from current events, but the double whammy of Brexit plus the supply shocks of COVID have certainly made things more challenging for Insomnia’s organisers. “We’ve absorbed most of that cost,” says Fletcher, ”because we want it [Insomnia] to still be within the reach of people to attend.” Another understandable hangover from COVID is
that potential festival-goers are seemingly leaving ticket purchases as late as possible, presumably because they fear a last-minute cancellation. Despite this however, Fletcher is pleased with how sales have gone: “Our ticket sales, actually, we’re quite happy with. We’ve been encouraged
April 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 51
by the sales we’ve done. I was expecting it to be worse, frankly, but I think the last few weeks will really tell us, because we need to know what the new normal is. Like, do you sell half the event in the last three weeks? Is that what it’s going to be back to, because that’s what it was like 15 years ago? Even on the commercial side, people have left it a lot later booking stands and things like that, which doesn’t help our blood pressure. “But it’s all good. I see it as an opportunity,” says
Fletcher, referencing the process of Ecological Succession, where, for example, a devastating forest fire will instigate new and distinct growth in its wake. “It means you get new ideas, you get new companies coming forward. It’s an opportunity for things to be revitalised. I think that’s a silver lining to the horrors that we’ve all been through the last two years. It means we can come back stronger.”
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