How we source and check the data

The source for a festival is the festival’s own website, and for a price it is that site or the ticket seller the site links to. Aggregators, blogs, encyclopedia entries and resale sites are not used as sources for anything, even when they are right, because there is no way to tell from them what the organiser actually said.

Each fact is recorded with the sentence from the page that states it. If a fact cannot be quoted, it is not written down — which is why some festival pages are shorter than others rather than filled in from somewhere else.

Confirmed means the festival has published these dates and we have read them on its site.

Approx. means the next edition has not been announced and the dates shown follow the pattern of previous years — the same weekend in the same month. The month is reliable; the exact days are not, and they change. Anything marked approx. should be confirmed on the festival’s own site before you book travel.

Festival pages carry the date the listing was last checked against the official site, so you can see how fresh it is rather than assuming.

Prices are recorded only where the festival or its ticket seller has published them. A price is never estimated, and last year’s price is never carried forward to this year’s edition — a festival that has not opened sales is shown as not on sale, with no figure.

Where a page shows both a face value and a fee-inclusive total, the face value is recorded, so a listed price is generally what you pay before fees rather than the checkout total. Ticket states are kept distinct: on sale, not yet on sale, sold out, and free.

Many festivals never publish a price at all and only reveal it in checkout. Those show no price rather than a guess.

A ticket link should take you to the festival’s own ticket page or the seller it authorised — never to a resale marketplace, and never to an unrelated event.

Stored links are audited automatically for destinations that are unsafe or obviously wrong, and separately checked by loading the page to confirm the destination is the festival it claims to be. That process has caught real mistakes, including a link that pointed at a municipal payment portal rather than a ticket seller.

It is still the highest-risk thing on the site, which is why it is the thing most worth telling us about if you find one wrong.

These are read from the festival’s own site and recorded in its words. An age policy with a condition attached is quoted with the condition rather than flattened to “18+”. Camping is recorded as yes, no, or not stated, and not stated is shown as such instead of assumed.

Lineups are recorded only for the edition they belong to. A festival whose next lineup has not been announced shows no lineup, even when last year’s is still sitting on its website.

Listings are re-checked on a schedule rather than once at entry, with festivals happening soon checked more often than ones a year away. Dates, prices and ticket links each have their own checks, and a change to a saved festival is what an alert is for.

Automation does the reading; it does not do the deciding on anything contested. A festival that is cancelled, dormant or has lost its website is handled by a person.

Festivals change dates, move sites, sell out and get cancelled, often faster than any schedule of checks. A listing here is a record of what the festival said when it was last read, not a promise about today.

Confirm on the official site before booking travel or accommodation. Every festival page links to it.

Where a fact is missing, the page says it is missing. That is deliberate: an empty field is information, and filling it with a plausible guess would make the whole calendar less useful.

Some ticket links earn a commission. That is disclosed where those links appear, it never changes which festivals are listed or how they are ordered, and no festival can pay for placement. More on how the site is funded.

Corrections are the main way this gets better. Report a correction — a wrong date, a dead ticket link, a festival listed that no longer runs.