GOTOBEAT
GOTOBEAT ' S FESTIVAL FUTURE
Mike Lightford is spearheading Gotobeat ' s expansion into the festival market, drawing on his experience of developing and programming Boardmasters and NASS.
At NASS, Lightford helped move the festival beyond its skate and BMX roots towards a broader celebration of counterculture, incorporating rap, drum and bass, and underground electronic music. His time at Vision Nine included negotiating artist clauses during Covid, dealing with the cancellation of a Boardmasters because of a hurricane, and managing relationships between artists, agents and tour managers.
His move to Gotobeat comes as the data-driven company looks to build on its existing touring and live events business that includes a recently launched arena division.
“ They ' re a company that does things differently,” says Lightford.“ They ' re really
Mike Lightford – MAX @ gianspeaking
Having been hired by Gotobeat to head its new festival division, Mike Lightford outlines the plan to build festivals around underserved audiences.
entrepreneurial and trying to challenge the status quo.”
Gotobeat delivered more than 1,000 shows in 2026, giving Lightford an existing platform to build on rather than having to establish a festival operation from scratch.
Initial plans include a six-show series across two weekends in July next year at London’ s Beckenham Place Park. The series is expected to attract more than 35,000 attendees across each weekend, with around a dozen artists performing daily across two stages.
The series will include events under the Beckenham Live banner covering a range of genres including rap, rock and pop. It will also involve Unión, which Lightford describes as a contemporary music festival for the UK’ s Latin American community that will include genres such as reggaeton and Latin pop.
Rather than focusing solely on the biggest names in Latin music, Lightford says he wants to identify artists with significant audiences in their home markets who have had limited opportunities to perform in the UK.
“ There are an awful lot of audiences out there that are a little bit underserved,” he says.
Lightford believes the scale of the shows at Beckenham Place Park, which will have a capacity of around 12,000, means the series can provide acts with a stepping stone towards the larger outdoor festivals. The plans include having a second stage with a capacity of around 2,000 in order to help create opportunities for emerging and underground artists.
With the cost-of-living crisis coupled with soaring event ticket prices resulting in live music shows being unaffordable for many, Lightford is focused on making Gotobeat’ s festivals reasonably priced.
“ I ' m really keen to ensure that we adopt a music-for-all policy here,” he says.“ I ' ve got a real sense of what ' s right alongside the business element. I ' m looking forward to putting my stamp on how I believe we should work professionally, but in a really friendly and open-for-business manner, with a spirit of fairness across the board.”
Rather than creating a new department, Lightford will initially work with Gotobeat ' s existing team including its Latin American music promoters, such as Alessandro Sforza, and the wider team of promoters from Argentina, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and Turkey.
While the first test will come at Beckenham Place Park in 2027, Lightford is thinking beyond the first six shows planned for the site. He says the aim is to build a festival operation around the same principles: finding audiences outside the established market, giving developing artists room to grow and using Gotobeat’ s existing international network to create new opportunities.
The ultimate aim, says Lightford, is to expand Gotobeat’ s festival footprint much further afield:“ I ' d like to create a series of events across Europe, but we ' ll begin in the UK.”
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