If you like sessions - obviously a good place to meet lots of other session addicts who you wouldn't meet any other time and swap tunes and songs with them.

If you like listening to the booked artists (somebody does, or the festivals wouldn't book them) it's a great opportunity to see/hear lots of them in a short space of time. It's often argued that for the cost of a festival ticket you can see far more performers than you would if you had to pay the same money in concert tickets for each of them separately.

Club organisers with any clue go to hear new performers that they might book for their clubs. Performing artists go for the same reason.

And as the folk scene is a community where lots of people from all over the country know each other, festivals are great just for making new friends and bumping into old ones, catching up on gossip and finding out what's going on outside your own neck of the woods.

A no-brainer, really.

Anahata