Many of these German festivals have actually become worse after getting lots of media attention. You notice it by many small issues that gradually appear; e.g.

Many of these German festivals have actually become worse after getting lots of media attention. You notice it by many small issues that gradually appear; e.g. choice of music acts that aims towards getting more random people paying for a ticket (e.g. popular "gangsta" rap at a former indie rock festival), people who are more interested in booze or in their makeup than in the music, etc. Gradually the people who are actually into the music will disappear if organisers don't stay true to the original ideas behind a festival. (Of course with financial pressures such is often easier claimed than done..) But nothing is ever black and white, and one other observation is that organisers actually do have control, and are not bound to cross a point of no return. Take Leipzigs Wave-Gotik-Treffen [1]: This is one of the biggest Goth and Dark Culture Festivals in the world. Events are decentralized all over the city, so the city of Leipzig turns black for a couple of days every year around whitsun. Lots of creative people are around, so similar to Burning Man in Germany it received huge media attention during the past couple of years, just by being well suited for a photo series. Search for "Viktorianisches Picknick" (Victorian picnic) on GoogleImages. Yet they only sell full time (4 day) tickets. Due to the popularity for years organisers have been urged to introduce day tickets, but they have refused to do so because they only wanted to serve to a dedicated community. They could have made more money and rent better concert halls, however decided for keeping the community. The festival stayed small, no more than 30.000 attendees each year, not many big acts, it actually still has "Treffen" (meetup) atmosphere for Germany's goth scene, and the creative people continue attending. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-Gotik-Treffen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-Gotik-Treffen