There is a particular moment I have come to recognize. Every year a festival lineup drops. My phone starts vibrating. Before I have even properly looked at the poster, the internet has already decided what it thinks. Mid, L festival, “This is embarrassing”, “Where are the Indian artists?” “Why are there so many Indian artists?” “No underground?” “Who are these underground artists?” Over the years, I have watched this happen so many times that sometimes I find myself looking at the comments even before looking at the lineup, almost like checking the weather app when I can already see the drizzle start to form. And I say this as someone who has occupied an unusually fluid position in this music ecosystem. I have been a music journalist writing about artists and scenes, an artist myself, and also sat on the other side of the table.
Inside the marketing machinery of some of the world’s biggest music festivals, a lineup isn’t simply a list of names but a product that has to be sold. I have personally been involved in seeding rumours, working with influencers, allowing certain “leaks” to travel, building narratives around real artists, creating speculation around artists who weren’t necessarily coming, and watching how a single name can move the conversation days before the actual announcement. Which means I have seen something from both sides that I find increasingly difficult to ignore. The festival and the audience have developed a rather unhealthy relationship with expectation.
The festival spends weeks telling you something enormous and gigantic is coming; the internet spends those weeks deciding what “enormous” means, fan pages build imaginary lineups, somebody’s “true inside source” confirms something, another person says they’ve heard a different name; an artist’s tour dates suddenly become evident; an Instagram story becomes a clue, a prediction account gets one thing right and becomes Nostradamus and Baba Vanga of the scene.
By the time the actual lineup drops, nobody is looking at it as a collection of artists anymore. They are comparing it to a fantasy that has been silently sprouting in thousands of people’s heads. And then we act surprised when the first response is “mid.” The strange thing isn’t that people are disappointed, but that we’ve built an entire system almost designed to disappoint them.
The Festival Sold You One Headliner. The Internet Sold You A Bigger One
The unfortunate reality when it comes to most lineup discussions is that the disappointment usually starts way before the lineup is even out. Marketing is basically a business of managing expectations. In reality, nobody likes to use that wording because the phrase “expectation manipulation” sounds much less attractive in a campaign deck. I have seen festivals around the world and learned that building expectation and anticipation is itself a gift. A cryptic post, a carefully timed influencer story, a rumor seeded into the right community, a “leaked” artist poster, a mysterious silhouette, a strategically worded caption — none of these things need to reveal the lineup to generate enormous conversation around it. And there is nothing inherently evil about it because hype is literally part of the job. The problem begins when the narrative built around the lineup becomes substantially larger than the lineup can realistically be. If you’ve spent months making people believe that something historic is about to happen, you haven’t just created excitement; you have created a benchmark. Now the booked artists are competing against the version of the artist that marketing made people imagine. And the audience isn’t entirely innocent here either. We have become spectacularly good at turning rumors into facts. Someone says an artist is “likely.” Five random music news pages pick it up and repeat it. Then someone posts a graphic saying “CONFIRMED.” Suddenly, not booking that artist feels like a betrayal. But what exactly was the promise? Nobody knows.
This is where the modern lineup announcement rollout gets almost absurd. A festival can disappoint you even with an artist it never promised. You can spend months emotionally preparing yourself to see Tame Impala, Drake, Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar, or whoever the internet has collectively decided is coming, and then become genuinely angry when the festival announces somebody else. The promoter technically did nothing wrong. But it still hits us hard when we finally get the answer to a question we have already answered incorrectly ourselves. And this is why these leaks and rumours are like a dangerous little drug. They make the eventual announcement feel less like discovery and more like an exam result.
Three People Who Will Always Hate Your Lineup
What I’ve learned is that there are at least three permanent residents of every music festival’s comment section, and the beautiful thing is that they can all be totally reasonable and, at the same time, make the festival’s job impossible. The first is The International Headliner Person. They are looking at the poster and thinking about the scale. They paid good money, they’ve seen the Indian artists before, they want the person whose name makes the whole festival feel like an event. Give them a strong global roster, and they still ask why there are only two true mega international acts. The second is the Indian Music Person who looks at the exact same poster and sees an industry that still hasn’t figured out how to scale Indian artists to the level they deserve. They want more local names, more diversity, more scenes, more regional representation, and fewer festivals pretending that cultural importance goes with a foreign passport. And then there’s the Credibility Person, that underground obsessive, scene historian who knows the artist with 4,700 monthly listeners and will happily tell you this is the booking you should actually care about. They will also say festivals only take established names and have no interest in discovery. But here’s where it gets funny: give them an artist with 200 monthly listeners, and suddenly the question becomes, “Who’s going to watch this?”
These three people are not necessarily hypocrites. They’re simply buying three completely different things. The first wants spectacle, the second wants representation, and the third wants discovery and cultural credibility. And a festival has to pay for all three with the same pot of money. This is where I think audiences sometimes need to understand the business behind the poster. You cannot simply say, “Why didn’t they book this insanely underrated artist?” because festivals don’t programme in a vacuum. An artist’s previous ticket sales, streaming numbers, social reach, market history, touring capacity, routing, fee and ability to convert attention into ticket sales all matter. If an artist has 200 listeners, putting them on a festival stage might be culturally exciting, but it is not automatically commercially sensible. A festival is not a grant program. There are production costs, artist fees, venue costs, marketing, staffing, infrastructure and thousands of tickets that need to be sold.
But then the opposite is also true. If festivals only accept people who can prove that they can sell tickets, how does anyone new get big enough to sell those tickets? How does any new sound break into the mainstream? How does an artist graduate from 2,000 listeners to 200,000? Somebody’s got to take the risk. This is the real tension in festival programming to me: the business wants proof before it will give an artist a stage, while culture needs the stage before the artist can create the proof. The answer can’t be “book only superstars.” But it also can’t be “book only underground artists.” The interesting festivals exist in the awkward middle ground.
We Have Made Festivals Compete Against Our Playlists
There is another problem that I think we are underestimating. Audiences have never had more personalized relationships with music. Streaming platforms now know what you like. Your algorithm can predict and suggest five artists who sound similar to the artist you discovered earlier, even before you’ve asked for them. Your music library can have more artists than a festival could physically book across ten stages. So when a festival puts up a lineup, it is effectively asking you to temporarily abandon the most personalized version of the music ecosystem and accept somebody else’s taste. And then we complain about why it doesn’t look like our playlist. But also a festival isn’t supposed to be your playlist. It is supposed to have a point of view, and that distinction really matters. I would much rather see a festival make ten genuinely interesting bookings and have three of them make me go, “What the hell is this?” rather than seeing twenty recognisable names that collectively say nothing.
But the internet doesn’t reward curation very well; it rewards recognition. A huge name gets screenshotted, but at the same time an unknown artist gets ignored. A festival announces a strange booking, and people ask why the festival wasted a slot. Then, six months later, that same artist blows up, and everybody suddenly claims they were ahead of the curve. We want discovery retrospectively. We want to have discovered the artist after somebody else took the risk. And the post-COVID concert economy has made this even more complicated. Live music has become bigger, more frequent, and more expensive. International artists are touring India more.
Festivals have grown, and people are now going to multiple shows a year. Once a festival ticket starts costing serious money, the audience stops asking “Do I like these artists?” and starts asking, “Is this worth what I’m paying?” That changes everything. A lineup that would have looked extraordinary ten years ago can look merely mediocre today because the baseline has shifted drastically. The industry has stirred an expectation inflation problem: the more extraordinary the live music economy becomes, the less extraordinary any individual event will feel. Give people three huge international acts, and they ask why there aren’t five. Give them five, and they ask why there isn’t one truly gigantic name. Give them the gigantic name and they ask where the Indian representation is. Add an Indian representation and somebody will ask where the underground is. Add underground and someone asks why they are paying ₹10,000 to watch artists they have never heard of. We have effectively built a machine where “more” has become the only measurable definition of “better.”
Maybe The Problem Isn’t The Lineup. Maybe It’s The Deal We Have Made With It
I don’t think the specific answer to this problem is to ask audiences to stop complaining. Festivals absolutely deserve criticism. Some lineups genuinely are lazy, some marketing campaigns deliberately overinflate expectations, and some festivals recycle the same names, under-invest in local artists or hide behind scale when what they really lack is a point of view. I also don’t think a festival should be expected to be the biggest commercial event in the country, while also serving as the most important platform for Indian musicians, the tastemaker for underground culture,the cheapest possible ticket, the home of every international superstar and a place where nobody has ever heard of half the lineup. At some point, those things don’t work together. The festival has to decide what it stands for, and what it has to give up, and maybe that’s what we should really ask from festivals: not that everyone likes the lineup but that the lineup has a reason.
Give me a festival that knows why Artist A is next to Artist B. Give me one massive name if the organizer can afford it, but give me the weird booking too. Give an Indian artist the stage before everyone agrees they’re worth it, and please take this commercial risk occasionally. Stop promising “the BIGGEST thing you’ve ever seen” every three months.
And as audiences, perhaps we need to become slightly better at separating disappointment from deception. If an artist was never promised officially, you weren’t betrayed. If an underground artist has just 3,000 listeners, that doesn’t mean they’re worthless; it means someone is taking a bet. If there are fewer international names, that doesn’t automatically mean the festival has failed. And if the poster doesn’t resemble your personal playlist, perhaps that is the whole point. I see how the festival lineup has turned into a cultural object because the festival sits at the crossroads of art, business, identity, marketing and ego. The festival wants you to buy a ticket. The artist wants you to believe in them. The marketer wants you excited. The fan wants to feel represented. The tastemaker wants to feel ahead of everyone, and the internet wants something to be angry about. All of those desires meet at the intersection of lineup poster.
No one wonders why somebody types “mid.” I think we should stop treating the word mid as the final verdict and begin asking, “What is this festival trying to say?” Because a perfect lineup probably does not exist anymore. Not when every person carries a different fantasy, algorithm, expectation, and a different definition of value. The real failure isn’t a lineup that makes 60 percent of people unhappy. The real failure is a lineup that makes nobody feel anything at all.