CEO of Electric Picnic Melvyn Benn has said that the cost of staging this year’s Electric Picnic, where Hozier and Chappell Roan will be headlining, will be between €25m to €30m.
Asked are artists’ fees the largest proportion of the costs, Mr Benn said: “No, artists’ costs wouldn’t be the largest part. Site infrastructure costs are quite high.”
Mr Benn confirmed the costs associated with staging the largest ever EP music festival at Stradbally, Co Laois as he dismissed claims that Electric Picnic is ‘anti-competitive’.
Mr Benn said: “We are very competitive.”
Mr Benn was responding to a claim by local independent brewer, David Walsh Kemmis who claimed that EP is anti-competitive as part of a submission made on the EP licence application for this year’s event to Laois County Council.
In one of six submissions made to the Council on EP Republic Ltd’s licence application, Mr Walsh Kemmis of Ballykilcavan Brewing Company said: “With a view to supporting small local businesses, I would like to see the Council enforce a planning condition that the festival organisers must provide access to the festival for food and drink suppliers based in Laois, even if their product is in competition with a sponsor of the festival.
The 13th generation farmer claimed: “Currently, huge multinational companies are able to buy exclusivity by providing sponsorship, so that any local companies providing the same type of products are not allowed to sell at EP.
He said: “I believe that this is anti-competitive and completely unfair. It is however not illegal, so the organisers will continue to implement this system unless they are forced to let local businesses in, and the only way to do this is through planning requirements.
In an interview, Mr Benn said that every year, EP has “an awful lot of local businesses and local traders that sell at the festival”.
Mr Benn gave the example of Laois Taste which is a collection of local producers which sell their produce at the Electric Picnic
He said that “we work very closely with local traders and I choose the ones that I work with. It is not up to the local authority to say who we work with. We have the freedom to choose who we work with and we exercise that freedom”.
Mr Benn said: “We have several different beer brands at Electric Picnic and we choose the beer brands and distributors that we want to work with and it works wonderfully well.”
Mr Benn said Electric Picnic provides an enormous economic boost to the local economy.
The 2025 Electric Picnic is set to be the biggest event in the music festival’s 22-year history.
In the licence application, EP Republic Ltd is seeking permission from Laois County Council to increase the daily numbers attending each day to 80,000.
This is a 5,000 increase on the 75,000 tickets that were sold for the 2024 event.
Tickets for the 2025 EP event went on sale on 21 August last and sold out within hours without any act confirmed at the time.
This year’s event returns to the traditional last weekend of August where it will run from Thursday 28 August to Sunday 31 August.
The first Electric Picnic was staged on Saturday 4 September 2004 when around 10,000 people attended.
Reporting by Gordon Deegan
