MONDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3BY JENNIFER HASSANlondon — Adele carefully curat-
ed the order of songs on her latest
album, “30,” calling the 12 tracks
her “ride or die throughout the
most turbulent period of my life.”
But a Spotify setting that shuffles
album tracks in a random order
apparently threatened to disrupt
the flow of her musical narrative.
“This w as the only request I had
in our ever changing industry!”
Adele tweeted Saturday, asking
that the album be streamed with
the tracks in order. “We don’t cre-
ate albums with so much care and
thought into our track listing forno reason. O ur a rt t ells a story and
our s tories should b e listened t o as
we intended,” she continued be-
fore thanking the platform.
“A nything for you,” Spotify
tweeted in response to the singer.
The streaming giant removed the
shuffle play button from the top of
the page for “30.” The option to
shuffle the album still remains.
As the star’s album stirred a
wave of emotions among Adele’s
fans since its release Friday, so did
this public exchange.
Some on social media ques-
tioned who would dare listen to a
newly released album for the first
time on shuffle, while othersseemed concerned Adele had
forced Spotify to ban the shuffle
button entirely.
“A dele i s 100% right. People who
listen to albums on shuffle are
definitely insane,” read one tweet,
while another read: “I love you
@Adele but let me shuffle i n peace
haha I love the randomness.”
“A dele’s 30 is somehow a story.
Tr y listening the album from start
to end. It feels like she’s telling her
story - her darkest hours, divorce,
herself,” read one tweet, while an-
other fan put it simply: “A dele has
spoken. Never shuffle albums.”
A Spotify spokesperson issued a
statement to The Washington Postand other outlets on Sunday, try-
ing to clear up any confusion: “A s
Adele m entioned, w e are excited t o
share that we have begun rolling
out a new Premium feature that
has been long requested by both
users and artists to make ‘ play’ t he
default button on all albums. For
those users still wishing to shuffle
an album, they can go to the Now
Playing View and select the ‘shuf-
fle’ toggle. As always, we will con-
tinue to iterate our products and
features to create the best experi-
ences for both artists and their
fans.”
Many Spotify users have long
questioned the s huffle setting. In ablog post published on a Spotify
help forum in 2 019, one l istener by
the name of Mark expressed his
frustration, writing: “Surely it
would make more sense to just
start a playlist in order and then
choose Shuffle play if you want
rather than mess it up by doing it
this way.”
After a six-year break, Adele re-
leased an emotive album that cov-
ers heartbreak, divorce and the
paranoia that often comes with
parenthood.
Just 2 4 hours a fter the release of
her first song from the album,
“Easy on Me,” the star shattered
records on both Spotify and Ama-zon Music.
“On Friday, October 15th,
Adele’s Easy On Me became Spoti-
fy’s m ost-streamed s ong i n a single
day,” the audio company con-
firmed as Amazon said the single
had received “the most first-day
Alexa song requests in Amazon
Music history.”
The star’s return has made
headlines all over the world. In an
interview with Oprah, Adele dis-
cussed topics such as h er divorce
and her new boyfriend, Rich Paul.
[email protected]Tr avis M. Andrews contributed to this
report.Hello, Spotify, it’s Adele: Star asked service not to shu±e ‘30’ — and it listenedwant to experience a trigger that
makes me relive those events,” he
said. (Scott has said he was “dev-
astated” and working with au-
thorities investigating what went
wrong.)
So far, 10 people have died as a
result of those crowd crushes.
Diaz can’t believe the number is
so low.
“A fter all that, I’m done with
festivals,” he said. “I don’t want to
leave anything up to chance, to
say, ‘Hopefully they care about
me.’ ”
By their nature, music festivals
run the risk of turning into miser-
able experiences, if not outright
dangerous ones. The original
1969 Woodstock, which has come
to symbolize the idyll all fests
aspire to, was rife with issues:
bands performed hours late, an
anarchist group tore down fenc-
ing and two people died, one run
over by a tractor. Thirty years
later, the 1999 version devolved
into riots that led to three deaths,
44 arrests and widespread re-
ports of sexual assault.N
onetheless, fans flock to
them. Roughly 32 million
people, more than the pop-
ulation of Te xas, attend music
festivals each year.
“For many young people, it’s a
formative event,” said Gina Ar-
nold, author of “Half a Million
Strong: Crowds and Power From
Woodstock to Coachella.” And
others “go to music festivals to
participate in history. They want
to be part of something that they
can historically say, ‘I was a part
of it. I went to Woodstock. I was at
Astroworld.’ ”
They’ve become the United
States’ premiere live music ex-
perience, fueled by the creation of
California’s Coachella Valley Mu-
sic and Arts Festival in 1999,
Te nnessee’s Bonnaroo Music and
Arts Festival in 2002 and the
revival of Chicago’s Lollapalooza
in 2003.
And most festivals run smooth-
ly enough. The ones that don’t
often share similar problems: In-
sufficient security. Poor crowd
control. Lack of planning. A
shortage of water.
“There’s always been tension
between promoters, organizers
or artists wanting to maximize
profits and an audience that just
wants to have a good time,” said
Steven Hyden, who chronicled
the 20th anniversary of Wood-
stock ’99 in his podcast “Break
Stuff: The Story of Woodstock
’99.”
One issue, Arnold said, is that
unlike in Europe, where music
festivals have been part of the
cultural landscape for decades,
the United States has been in a
20-year mad dash to build the
infrastructure to support hun-
dreds of new fests, much of which
is done in a “slipshod” way.
The Fyre Festival in 2017, which
proved to be such a disaster it
inspired competing documenta-
ries on Netflix and Hulu, high-
lighted this principle to an absurd
degree. Fans arrived to Fyre,
which was billed as “two transfor-
mative weekends” on a “remote
and private” island in the Baha-
mas, only to find boxed cheese
sandwiches, what appeared to be
“FEMA tents” and headliner
bands pulling out at the last
minute — along with barely any
festival staff (or, frankly, any festi-
val). It was later described as
“nothing more than a get-rich-
quick scam.”
Adding to the issues is that
festivals can be antithetical to
enjoying live music if the end-
game is to assemble as many
bodies as possible into a confined
space — on a budget.
This year’s Virginia-based, in-
dependently run Blue Ridge Rock
Festival, which hosted the likes of
Rob Zombie and Limp Bizkit inFESTIVALS FROM C1Whenmusicfestivals getout of handfavorite artists in one weekend.”
From the moment Irwin and
his girlfriend arrived at Astro-
world, though, something felt off.
He only noticed two water sta-
tions for the approximately
50,000 attendees. It took them 45
minutes to fill their bottles. He
also found it odd that Scott had
his own stage. At most music
festivals, multiple acts play at the
same time — on various stages
throughout the day — to assist
with crowd control.
As S cott’s performance started,
panic set in and Irwin and his
girlfriend tried to push their way
out of the crowd to no avail.
Eventually, they stumbled upon a
pile of bodies on the ground,
which included one unresponsive
girl. They tried to give her CPR,
but there were too many people
packed in to do it properly.
Looking back, Irwin knows
they were lucky. Between them,
he and his girlfriend lost two
shoes and a phone. While at-
tempting find the missing phone,
the pair ended up finding six. Two
belonged to people he later
learned had died at the festival.
The experience has left him
shaken, but he doesn’t plan to
give up music fests. They’re too
special.
“I have a little bit of PTSD and a
little bit of anxiety thinking of
going into a big crowd again, but
I’m going to work through that,”
Irwin said. “I still love the over-
arching idea of festivals.”
[email protected]
[email protected]bury in England and Roskilde —
“were among my least favorite
gigs we ever had. ... They were
nightmares to me, personally.”
“You’re in a bubble on that
stage,” Krukowski said. “You actu-
ally don’t hear or even see the
audience. You’re in a weird, cut-
off world.”
The 58-year-old rocker has be-
come a vocal critic of the festival
circuit and said artists should
demand higher standards, in-
cluding better pay.
“I have never had a friend in a
band who said to me, ‘these are
my dream gigs,’ ” said Krukowski.
But without these shows, it can be
difficult for artists, beyond me-
gastars like Travis Scott, to make a
middle-class living. “Festivals
suck money out of a larger system
[of clubs and independent ven-
ues] and concentrate it.”
Whatever their problems, festi-
vals aren’t going anywhere. And
neither are their fans.
Cooper Irwin found himself
trapped in the same Astroworld
crowd as Noah Diaz. Unlike Diaz,
Irwin is a veteran of music festi-
vals, drawn to “the community
and the crowd.” During his time
at t he University of Te xas, the now
26-year-old Austin resident regu-
larly attended South by South-
west and Austin City Limits. He’s
since branched out to Governor’s
Ball in New York City and Electric
Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas.
“When it’s special, it’s special.
You end up meeting really cool
people,” he said. “A nd I love the
ability to see five or 10 of yourbecome a public health concern,
we’re going to lose access to one of
the most wonderful things about
our country: that we have such a
diverse and wide availability of
different types of music in differ-
ent places.”Even when festivals take the
proper precautions, howev-
er, things can get out of
hand. Hyden, the cultural critic,
pointed to Roskilde Festival in
Denmark in 2000, where nine
people were trampled to death
during a Pearl Jam performance.
The festival had reduced at-
tendance to prevent overcrowd-
ing. Metal poles were erected
around the ground to prevent
crowd surges.
“They were trying to do a good
festival, and they still had one of
the worst tragedies ever,” Hyden
said. In all these instances, he
contemplates the “unanswerable
question” of what is the “X-factor
of what drives people to act in a
way that potentially hurts other
people in the audience? That’s, I
think, harder to contemplate,
that darker question.”
Things aren’t always great for
the artists, either. Damon Kru-
kowski, who toured the major
festival circuit a few decades ago
as part of the influential indie
rock band Galaxie 500, said some
of the massive European festivals
they played — such as Glaston-lake for attendees to cool off in.
But once they arrived, water
was difficult to find, and food
vendors quickly ran dry — Cram-
er and his friends subsisted on
peanut butter and jelly for three
days. The lake was closed. Porta
Potties overflowed with human
waste. Staff was scant, at best.
More troubling, Cramer said, se-
curity and advertised covid pre-
cautions were scarce.
But the horrible conditions
brought people together. Jared
Barnhart, a 25-year-old Ithaca,
N.Y., resident and a Type 1 diabet-
ic, attended Elements specifically
because of the promised covid
protocols — everyone was to be
vaccinated or tested — only to be
dismayed that they weren’t fol-
lowed. He’ll never attend it again,
describing it the way one might a
war.
“People bonded over the trau-
ma of standing in a field for up to
16 hours,” Barnhart said. “We
knew without saying what we’d
all gone through and what was
still in store for the weekend.”
After he complained, Cramer
said, festival organizers offered
him a 33 percent discount on
their next event, which he turned
down. When he finally left, he
said, “A ll we could do is laugh and
say, ‘Never again.’ ”
Not Elements, at least.
“I’m very concerned for this
industry,” he said. “If concertsSeptember, inspired more than
8,000 attendees to form the Face-
book group Screwed by Blue
Ridge Rock Festival. Complaints
ranged from a shortage of park-
ing spaces to a lack of accessibility
for those with disabilities. Mean-
while, To morrowWorld, an Amer-
ican spinoff of the wildly popular
Belgian electronic dance music
festival To morrowLand, lasted
only three years. Attendees of the
2015 festival in Chattahoochee
Hills, Ga., reported water and
food shortages and that organiz-
ers weren’t prepared for inclem-
ent weather.
If festivals have such a pen-
chant for unpleasantness — not
to mention danger — then why go
in the first place?
Benjamin Cramer, a 27-year-
old Baltimore resident, has at-
tended fests across the world for a
decade and has no plans of stop-
ping — though he knows how bad
things can get. He loves “the
freedom of mobility I have when
I’m in a big festival where I can
move around to different stages,
explore different music.”
His personal weekend from
hell took place in September 2021
at the Elements Festival in Lake-
wood, Pa.
Cramer and his friends waited
hours in the parking lot for buses
to take them the three or so miles
to the festival grounds, which
included a 150-acre field with aJAMAAL ELLIS/HOUSTON CHRONICLE/ASSOCIATED PRESSNANCY ANDREWS/THE WASHINGTON POSTCALLAGHAN O'HARE/REUTERS
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: The crowd at the deadly Astroworld
Festival on Nov. 5; a makeshift memorial for Brianna Rodriguez,
16, one of the youngest victims of the tragedy; Woodstock ’99, held
in Rome, N.Y., devolved into riots. By their nature, music festivals
run the risk of turning miserable — or even dangerous.