HMV offers first Reading & Leeds festival tickets

12th March 2012

Editorial Assistant

Entertainment News

Tickets to the Reading & Leeds 2012 music festival will go on sale at selected HMV stores an hour before the official release, it has been confirmed today.

HMV is one of the main sponsors of the three day event run by Festival Republic, and 15 of its stores will make tickets available at 18:15 GMT today (Monday March 12th) while the general sale starts at 19:15 GMT.

The full line-up of acts performing over the three days starting on August 24th will also be announced later today, with major international artists expected to be confirmed for the decades-old festival which last year attracted over 162,000 people to its two locations.

Stores in Birmingham, London and Manchester are involved in the promotion (full list below) which HMV will hope drives traffic to its stores at a time when trading remains difficult.

In December the retailer said that it will be able to continue to operate for the “foreseeable future”, but admitted to “material uncertainties” surrounding its business model.

It had been rumoured that the group would look to sell off its live music division to concentrate on its core operations, after closing large numbers of stores and selling book business Waterstones during the last year.

Christmas sales fell 8.2 per cent year-on-year for the firm as online competitors as well as leading supermarkets continued to eat up market share of the entertainment retail sector.

Reading has hosted a music festival since 1971, originally focused solely around rock music, and in 1999 it launched the Leeds leg of the event which sees all the same bands play, over the same weekend, but on different days.

High demand saw tickets sell-out for the event in a matter of hour for most of the last decade but last year weekend tickets were still available to the festival just a day before it opened.

List of participating stores in the early-ticket promotion: