THE CONTEXT
At this scale, small issues compound quickly. Food, accessibility, queues, value for money - once the festival ends, it’s too late to address them.
Historically, Tons of Rock relied on post-event surveys to understand the crowd experience. Feedback typically arrived through a Google Form after the festival had ended.
By then, urgency was gone and prioritisation was difficult. Going into the festival, the question was simple: Is it even possible to collect meaningful, usable feedback during a festival of this size?
We’d always relied on post-event surveys to understand the audience experience. The challenge was that by the time the feedback came in, the festival was over and it was hard to prioritise what really mattered. We were genuinely unsure whether live feedback at this scale would be practical.
THE SHIFT
Together with Foodback, the festival introduced live, low-friction feedback during the event itself. No app downloads. No logins. No disruption to the experience.
Fans could share input while the festival was actually happening. The goal wasn’t to “survey more”, but to determine whether live feedback could be trusted at scale. The setup required minimal internal resources and no changes to existing festival operations.
Across the festival, Tons of Rock gathered live feedback on core parts of the experience.
The volume and consistency of responses made one thing clear: fans were willing to engage even in a high-energy environment, as long as the interaction was simple.
• 2,698 food feedback responses, answering five structured questions.
• Over 13,000 structured data points captured live.
• 811 written comments, adding qualitative depth.
This was more than sentiment. It was a live signal.
LIVE INSIGHT
By analysing free-text responses during the festival, Tons of Rock uncovered clear, prioritised insight into unmet demand, something that’s notoriously hard to achieve at festival scale.Rather than vague complaints, the feedback highlighted:
• Specific gaps in the experience
• Clearer demand for certain options
• Structural access issues affecting perception of value
This shifted the conversation from “how was it?” to what exactly needs to change, what can be optimised further and why.
This level of contextual insight is extremely difficult to extract from post-event surveys or social media, where timing and context are lost.
The live feedback report was reviewed by festival leadership and shared with Food & Beverage and Operations teams. The signal was trusted and used as a genuine input into planning for this years edition.Perhaps the biggest shift was psychological.
Tons of Rock proved that live feedback at this scale wasn’t risky or noisy - it was very doable.
What surprised us most was the quality of the input. We didn’t just get scores, we got specific, prioritised feedback we could actually trust. It showed us that collecting live insight during a festival like this isn’t risky or chaotic. It’s very doable.
OUTCOMES AND TAKEAWAY
As a result:
• planning for 2026 is being refined using live crowd insight
• internal confidence in live feedback increased significantly
• the partnership with Foodback was renewed
Most tellingly, Tons of Rock decided to expand the use of Foodback at an even larger scale for the 2026 festival.
The insight was shared with leadership and the relevant teams, and it’s now being used directly in planning the next edition of the festival. Based on the value we saw, the decision to continue, and scale this further for 2026, was straightforward.
Tons of Rock didn’t prove that live feedback is nice to have. They proved something more important:
That even in the middle of large-scale festival chaos, fans will provide honest, structured, and actionable input if you make it easy.
By replacing post-event guesswork with live, trusted crowd intelligence, Tons of Rock gained clarity it could actually act on.
Once that trust was established, scaling it became the obvious next step.
