Music festivals are an increasingly important part of the cultural sector. Additionally, they are cyclical occasions for people from different milieus to encounter each other and experience the cultures from various circles and regions first hand. Last but not least, they can serve as an object for studying evolving societies. Thanks to the fact that they take place at regular intervals, one can see what modifications are implemented across editions and how they can both reflect and inspire the socio-cultural changes taking place in a society.

One of the more interesting phenomena in contemporary culture is that of festivalisation. On the most basic level, this means the fact that more and more festivals are established every year. On a deeper level, however, it pertains to the interconnections between different parts of social life, with festivals at their centre. As such, festivals can be said to influence all of their surroundings, both on the material level—affecting the local infrastructure through, for example, the need to provide accommodation for people attending the events—and the immaterial one—changing the way in which events of social life are expected to unfold, by making them more festival-like. Thus, music festivals are not only reflections of wider social changes, but can also cause such changes. Among other things, this can mean affecting the way in which one approaches diverse cultures and peoples. Festivalisation can also be understood in the sense of having an impact on the scene to which it relates. Receiving an award at a festival, or even being qualified to attend it, increases the prestige of the performer. Additionally, sometimes songs are written or arranged specifically to please the audience and jury of such an event. Both of these phenomena strongly shape the entirety of a music scene, and can also serve specific goals, such as promoting cultural diversity or maintaining local traditions—although it must be said that these two aims are in no way contradictory, good examples being local Jewish or Roma minorities (Bennett et al. 2014).

It is quite symptomatic that while defining the term festivalisation in 2016, Jan Burzyński has labelled it as derogatory, which can point to two tendencies. On the one hand, such an understanding of festivalisation may be rooted in a suspicious attitude towards ludic elements of culture, still present in academic circles.