the cashless festival is coming to Download at Donington

The heavy rock festival Download which returns for a seventh year, has confirmed it will be taking place over the weekend of Friday 12th to Sunday 14th June 2009 and will be returning to Donington Park, Castle Donington, Leicestershire at a meeting of organizers and fans to discuss making next year's festival even better than ever.

However due to site development at Donington Park for the Formula One racing event, changes will need to be made for Download 2009's site layout. The festival arranged a fan forum to get the input of the fans on the design of the new site for 2009. Attendees were encouraged to make suggestions for the layout by using maps, pens and diagrams to illustrate the alterations that could be made.

The Download fan forums have become an integral part of the development of Download, and last year suggestions were implemented across much of the festival. Disabled camping in 2008 was a major success with many disabled customers impressed with the improvements.

Download 2008 had numbered security which allowed festival goers to easily identify individual security personnel from over sized numbers and there were many cases of fans thanking specific security team members who had been particularly helpful or supportive.

As well as a significant improvement in security, an X-Ray machine was installed in the on site field hospital specifically for the festival, saving 55 people a trip to the hospital.

Forum fans also confirmed that having an eclectic bill was preferable and that there was a brilliant response to bands like Pendulum. Fans also suggested that the DJ slots worked really well and that more bands should be given guest slots.

The festival also has an interesting post over on its official forum, (here).

John Probyn the festival and production director for Live Nation has made the post which informs festival goers to prepare for a cashless system at Download.

He does also say that is not certain that the system will be implemented in 2009 but that it will definitely be introduced eventually to all of Live Nations' major events in the future. These include Oxegen, Global Gathering, Wireless, and Hard Rock Calling.

The post in full, is as follows:

Hi everyone

If this on line forum works I'm happy to do others in the future but as with the regular forums, you will get as much out of this as you put in to it. If you just want to sit there and slag us off there is no real point in us doing it because that will not make the festival better and that is my ONLY priority.

Only a handful of you have got to know me over the past couple of years at the regular forums so I thought I would give you the low down on who you are talking to. My name is John Probyn and I am the Festival and Production Director for Live Nation. Along with what I consider to be the best team of people in the industry, we are responsible for festivals (Download, Oxegen, Global Gathering, O2 Wireless and Hard Rock Calling) some of the countries biggest music events (Live 8, Live Earth, Concert for Diana, World Music Awards) and all local production and venue management for touring shows (AC/DC to Level 42). Our job is to deliver a show/event once someone has decided its going to happen, so we can be talking to AC/DC's Production Manager one minute, a Chief Constable the next followed by the guy who delivers the toilets. Every single day is different, brings new challenges and no, I don't have any jobs going!!

We constantly strive to improve everything we do and without a doubt, Download is the one event that we have the most passion for. Its our event, we own it and can basically do what we want with it without anyone else interfering and that’s why I want it to continue to grow and get better and better. With this in mind we try and introduce different things each year to achieve this. Most of them you guys don’t even notice but it seems that one of them has caught your attention for next year – THE CASHLESS SYSTEM!! It is not 100% certain that we will implement this system next year but trust me when I say that this Will be introduced to ALL major events in the future.

There are two very important facts that I need you to understand before we start. First of all we are NOT doing this to make more money and second, we are NOT doing this to make more money! The cost of the kit alone is over £1million so based on the spend per head of you tight arses I might break even by 2075!! So, here are the real reasons.

The cost of staging events like Download has increased by around 40% over the last 5 years. This is due mainly to the increase in artist fees, transport, artist fees, manpower artist fees and insurance – oh, and artist fees!!. There are two things I want to do and that is keep the increase of the ticket price to as little as possible by trying to reduce the cost of staging the festival and find out more about the spending habits of our customers so we can ensure that we give you things you want/need to buy.

At the moment we have many different locations around the site that handle cash. Bars, food units, market stalls, merchandise stalls etc and at every location we have to have a cash handling facility. Strong rooms, safes, accounting staff, cash collections, security etc and all of this costs a fortune and presents many opportunities for theft. The new system will reduce the amount of cash on site overall and will limit the locations cash is handled so this will reduce the cost of cash handling and increase the security and safety of staff.

The system will give us more flexibility on pricing. We looked at a token system that is used throughout festivals in Europe but everything you sell has to be priced in multiples of the tokens face value. With this system we can set the price of every single item sold on site to what ever we want and even change it when WE want to (happy hour, sponsored promotions etc) and not when the vendor thinks he can get away with it!

We will know exactly what products we have sold and in what quantities so if we only have 5 vegetarian units on site and they take twice as much money as 5 burger vans guess what we are going to do! If the bar to the left of the main stage gets hit very hard at certain times in the day we will be able to ramp up for this and make sure we have staff to cope with the demand. At the moment, all the vendors are managed by third parties who pay us a flat fee so the only feed back we get is from them – and do you think they are going to tell us how well they did!?

One of the problems we had this year was with under age drinkers to the point that we received an official caution from the police and have been instructed to improve the system we have in place for age verification of face loosing our licence and that would mean no bars!! There are all sorts of ways we could do this with the new system and the developers are working on what will be the best way but it is something we have no choice over.

The system will speed up queues and we will not charge you anything to use it, unlike cash machines. When you go to a vendor there will be a terminal that looks and works a bit like a cash till but has a screen on both sides. You touch the terminal with your wrist band/card and it tells you and the vendor what your balance is. You place your order and then touch the screen again and it deducts the cost from you balance and lets you know how much you have left.

You can top up on line, via mobile text and at points around the site with cash or cards - and yes there will be enough. At the end of the festival if you have any cash left you can retrieve it before you go home and anything left deposited from a card can be claimed back on line. If you loose cash you cant get it back, if you loose a credit card someone could use it to spend up to your credit card’s limit and if you loose your wrist band/card, we will cancel it and give you another with the same amount on it!

We will NOT, sell any data to third parties, send messaging to anyone who does not request to receive more information, charge more on the ticket price to pay for the service or charge you to pre-load your card with spending money. We have spent two years developing this idea and would not introduce it unless we were confident that it, and its back up systems were robust enough to cope with the worlds biggest rock concert.

Like I said, we may or may not introduce the system next year but its going to come eventually.

There are no acts confirmed yet for 2009. For the rumours of who might be playing, please click here.

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