Whoever holds the account holds the list in practice, whatever the contract says about ownership. For an annual festival that matters more than it does for a business trading every day, because the months between editions are when you have no live on-sale, a smaller office and, quite often, a licence that has lapsed. Read the clause now, and take an export while the agreement is still alive.
An edition ends and the team shrinks. The next on-sale is months away. That is exactly the window in which a per-edition licence runs out, a platform is acquired or a product is withdrawn, and the audience you spent years building sits in somebody else's database.
Ownership and access are two different questions
An agreement can say the data is yours and still leave you unable to get at it quickly. Check both sides of it.
- What the agreement says you own, and what the platform is separately permitted to do with the same records.
- Whether an export is self-service or has to be requested, and how long a request takes to come back.
- How long after the agreement ends the data stays available, and whether the final export carries a charge.
- Whose name and address the account is in. An account belonging to a departed production manager is hard to recover between editions.
- Whether marketing consent was collected in your name or the platform's, because that decides whether you may write to the list at all.
What an export actually has to contain
An email address and an order number is not an audience list. A festival's record of one person is spread across several products, and an export covering only the ticket leaves most of it behind.
- Orders: the tier bought, face value, fees, discounts, instalment plan status and refunds, each with its date.
- The person behind the order, linked across every edition they attended, so a long-standing regular is one record rather than several.
- Camping, campervan and parking bookings with the pitch type, because that is where much of the upsell lives.
- Name changes and resales, so the person who actually stood in the field is the one on the record.
- Scan data: which gate, which day, and whether a ticket went unused.
- Marketing consent with its date, source and wording, and every unsubscribe.
- Accreditation: artists, crew, press, traders and contractors, with the department that approved each pass.
- Cashless top-ups, spend by outlet and unclaimed balances, which may be money you still owe.
Export on a schedule, not in a dispute
Take an export after every on-sale and again once the gates close. Keep the files somewhere the festival owns rather than on one person's laptop, and open one to confirm it is readable. An export nobody has opened is a file of unknown quality.
Check the shape as well as the contents. A report designed to be printed is not a dataset, and a summary by tier will not let you rebuild one person's history.
The quiet months are when the bill goes unread
Renewals land when the on-sale is a long way off and nobody wants the argument, which is how a whole stack gets approved in one afternoon. Before you sign the next one, add up what the ticket fee, the wristband terms and each per-edition licence came to over the last edition. Our software bill calculator is a free calculator that turns a fee per ticket, a share of face value and a flat licence into yearly and three-year totals.
Our own position is that the customer owns the code and the data and can take both whenever they like, and that a new system runs beside the old one on a real but smaller release before anything is switched off. The payment rail behind cashless stays where it is. Our guide to owning your software goes further into data ownership and exit, and our page for music festivals sets out what is rented across an edition.