Your Perfect Festival · Result
The City Festival
An urban site, a day ticket, and your own bed at the end of it.
Designed rarity: about 12% of takers
You like your festival with a subway entrance thirty metres from the fence. A park or a plaza inside the city, a day ticket rather than a whole weekend, and your own bed at the end of it. You tend to see clearly that a lot of festival life is really just camping badly, and you would rather keep the music and skip the rest. Seoul suits you well, with Olympic Park, the river and Songdo all within easy reach.
You usually plan the day properly: which sets, which gate, which train home. If the weather turns, you go home and come back tomorrow, and you do not feel you have lost anything. You are good at fitting a festival around a working week, and you tend to arrive rested, which means you actually enjoy the afternoon sets that everyone else is still recovering through.
Your strength
You get three good days without three days of your life falling over.
Your blind spot
Keeping one foot outside the festival means it rarely takes you out of your routine.
Key takeaways
- Your festival has a subway entrance thirty metres from the fence.
- You get the programme without the tent, and Seoul does this well.
- Stay for the final set once, and see what the day becomes.
Rooms to try in Seoul
- Seoul Jazz Festival, Olympic Park, Songpa: A city park, a day ticket and a bill broad enough that you are never stuck, your whole argument in one site.
- Pentaport Rock Festival, Songdo, Incheon: A big site at the end of a train line, so you can do the full day and still sleep in your own bed.
- Hangang Festival, summer edition, Han River parks, Seoul: The city’s own summer programme along the river, mostly free outdoor music with the skyline as the backdrop.
Rooms to try around the world
- Movement, Detroit: Hart Plaza, downtown, three days you can walk home from, and the city itself is half the programme.
- Igloofest, Montreal: Outdoors in the Old Port in January with the metro running, the most Canadian answer to this format there is.
- Sonar, Barcelona: Day site and night site, both inside the city, so the festival never has to pretend it is somewhere else.
Your nearest types
Read next: Going Out in Seoul, neighbourhood by neighbourhood