Managing subcultural capital dynamics for dark events

In recent scholarship, there are growing concerns for the social drawsbacks of music festivals and for possible frictions with local communities and administrations. These concerns regard in particular festivals characterised by a strong subcultural identity, whereby organisers are often challenged with mediating the subcultural distinctiveness of an event whilst at the same time working to minimise any risk of misunderstanding and/or hostility from local communities. Such is the case for goth festivals which, despite being situated at the lighter end of the Dark Events’ Spectrum, are often associated with moral panics in consequence of their marketing campaigns that generally feature references to death and the macabre as part of the subcultural identity. This chapter adopts Thornton’s concept of subcultural capital to contribute to current studies concerning the conflictuality between subcultural music festivals and local contexts. To do so, it draws on the case study of Fano’s Goth Festival Moonlight Festival, which was cancelled after three editions (2009–2011) due to tensions with a part of the local administration, notwithstanding its commercial success and its appreciation from participants from all over Europe.