Sony’s Fantasy Festival

There’s no hiding it anymore – winter’s here. The sunshine has packed up and gone down south, and summer’s long gone.

We’ve got another 7 months until 2010’s festival season gets truly underway, so what can you do to pass the time until the next time you can watch the sun rise over the stone circle, or wake up next to someone not remembering their name, let alone your own? Well, we’d suggest that you give Sony’s Fantasy Festival a go.

Unfortunately it doesn’t involve getting your wellies muddy, or having too much warm beer than is probably healthy,  but it does offer you the chance to make your own fantasy festival lineup, and possibly win prizes along the way. How? Using the rather large amount of data that those nice guys at last.fm have amassed, you assemble your ultimate, imaginary festival line-up and gain as many points as possible through your acts’ popularity in the real world (calculated by activity online – blog posts, twitter mentions, last.fm plays etc).

Bands are given “buzz points” every Wednesday, and the person who creates the highest value Festival will be presented with four “money can’t buy” tickets (including VIP accommodation, flights and spending money) to one of Europe’s best festivals next summer. Alongside this, there are other prizes up for grabs in weekly draws. If you choose a band that is relatively unknown now, but starts to generate buzz over the next few months, we will give you kudos points in the main competition.

I’ve created a There Goes The Fear fantasy festival – a nice mixture of bands I love and are already huge, as well as a league for you to compete against us – it’s called, rather unimaginately, “TGTF”. Join that and pit your festival against ours – who knows, if you’re ahead of the crowd and spot the next Killers, you could well beat us!