Glastonbury sold “a few thousand” less tickets in 2025 to curb overcrowding, Emily Eavis says

Glastonbury Festival will see a few thousand less attendees in 2025 after organisers undersold tickets in a bid to curb overcrowding.

Co-organiser Emily Eavis shared the new tactic in an interview with Annie Mac and Nick Grimshaw on their BBC podcast Sidetracked yesterday (June 9), explaining that the festival has sold “a few thousand less tickets” this year.

It comes after the festival faced criticism in 2024 due to stage overcrowding, when festivalgoers reported busy stages, and the blocking of entry to certain areas in an effort to distribute large crowds.

Last year, over 210,000 people were said to have attended the Worthy Farm festival, making the 150,000-acre land the most densely populated place on earth during its five days.

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“It'll be interesting just to see how [cutting capacity] affects the dynamics on site,” Eavis said in the interview. “Just to see if there's a few thousand less can make an impact on some of the busier times.”

Eavis also claimed that when asking a group of 250 Glastonbury Festival staff whether they thought there were overcrowding issues in 2024 during a meeting "no-one put their hand up".

She added that the festival’s official app, which is used by attendees to curate personal line-ups over the weekend, was “really accurate last year”. She explained: “We can see what they're gonna see, which is really useful for us from a crowd perspective.”

“So we can say, red, orange, green. And we are like, ‘Okay, this is looking like it's gonna be a red, so the chances are, if it's gonna be busy, the field might have to be closed, right?’.”

Read this next: Glastonbury reveals new site map for 2025, expanding dance music areas

In May, Glastonbury revealed a new site map for 2025, which gave a first look at revamped and expanded areas, particularly dance music areas like Silver Hayes, Shangri-La, and Arcadia, which each saw large crowds in 2024.

Shangri-La is undergoing a revamp, coming complete with four new stages in a “ground up” redesign for the dance music-focused area, expanding in size to feature a larger public area and a new section named Dragon’s Tail.

Speaking on the changes to Shangri-La this year, Eavis explained: “They’re going completely the opposite of everything they’ve done in the past. They’re going full trees and green space – what we've done is we've added a field next to it.”

“I suggested that they make some space for the public there because I think it's really important to try and make space, particularly in the southeast corner, because it gets really busy at night.”

Listen to the full interview with Emily Eavis on Sidetracked with Annie and Nick here.

Gemma Ross is Mixmag's Associate Digital Editor, follow her on Twitter