Earproof has been doing this for 24 years. In that time we have seen what works on hundreds of festival grounds and what does not, and why earplugs at a festival should no longer be a question but a given.
Why they belong at your event
It is largely already agreed. The Fourth Covenant on the Prevention of Hearing Damage from Amplified Music, running from 2024 to 2027, asks venues and events to keep well-functioning earplugs low-threshold available and easy to find, alongside a ceiling of 103 dB(A) averaged over any fifteen minutes. It is an agreement between the sector and the ministry rather than a law, but it is the standard your peers are held to. Note that it asks for availability, not for giving them away: selling them is fine, and that is what most organisers do. On top of that, many municipalities write availability into the event permit, so at a festival it is often a hard condition as well.
It is service. People forget them at home, lose them on the way, or only notice at the first act that it is louder than they expected. You do not want anyone going home with a ringing in their ears. That is a poor souvenir of your festival.
It is education. An ear is fragile and easy to damage, and that message needs to keep coming back. Far from everyone knows that hearing damage usually does not heal. A festival is the one place where it lands, precisely because people can feel for themselves how loud it is.
It limits your exposure. Nobody wants a claim after the fact. If it does come to that, you want to be able to show that protection was available. Insurers pay attention to this.
And it earns. Earplug sales are an extra revenue stream on the grounds. Next to all the reasons above, a welcome bonus.
Which earplugs
The choice is wide: single use or reusable, cheap to expensive, mediocre to premium. There is a lot of variation in there, and the price says very little about the protection your visitor actually gets. So always ask for the measured attenuation, not just what it looks like.
Foam earplugs, the single use kind, you can write off by now. They cut everything back equally hard, which makes the music sound dull, so people take them out again after half an hour. You handed them out, but you protected nobody.
What you see everywhere now are filters with flat attenuation. Those are built to leave the experience intact: you still hear the music the way the artist intended it, only quieter. That is why people keep them in, and in the end that is the only thing that counts.
Where to put them
At the entrance, personal attention works. A stand with trained crew who take a moment to look: which size fits, which filter suits what you are doing tonight, fit it and check it. That takes a minute per visitor and people appreciate it, because most of them have never had anyone look at their ear before.
At the bar, the opposite works. That is your busiest point of the day and nobody wants a conversation there. That calls for a low-threshold earplug that protects almost everyone well, without sizing and without a queue.
The two complement each other. The entrance builds the story, the bar catches everyone who missed it.
Clubs and venues
The covenant covers you too. It reaches beyond festivals and music venues to clubs, bars, cinemas, student associations and sports clubs. What differs is the route: for an event the municipality often writes it into the permit, while for a permanent venue it runs through the covenant. The practical outcome is the same.
Two things do work differently in a club.
The exposure is repeated. A festival visitor takes one heavy night a year. A regular takes fifty. That makes the case for protection stronger, not weaker, and it makes your staff the group with the highest risk of all: they are in there every shift, for years.
There is no entrance stand. So the coat check becomes your equivalent of the festival entrance, and the bar stays the bar. Both points reach everyone, and neither costs you floor space you were using anyway.
The seasons also work in opposite directions. Festivals peak in summer, clubs pick up exactly when the fields empty out. If you run both, that is a supply line that never stands still.
How we would approach it with you
Every location is different. A dance festival with one big tent asks for something other than a multi-day festival with a campsite, and an indoor venue is different again.
So we would rather start by looking than by quoting. Send us your ground plan and your programme, and we will come back with a proposal: where the points go, which types belong there, and what comparable festivals see in volumes. You are not committing to anything, and you will know what is possible.
Going to a festival yourself?
Then the above is mostly good to know, not something you need to act on. For you it comes down to one thing: bring your own earplugs, and make sure they are a pair you can keep in all day.
The rule of thumb from this whole piece applies to you just as much. Earplugs you take out after half an hour because the music goes dull are not protecting you. Earplugs that let you hear the music properly stay in.
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