Glastonbury 2025: Emily Eavis is appealing to all fans with the line-up - even if you pretend not to know who headliner Olivia Rodrigo is

Like clockwork with every annual Glastonbury lineup announcement over the past decade, echoes of ‘who??’ rang out around the middle-aged social media accounts of Glasto veterans. This year, it’s Olivia Rodrigo that is mostly on the receiving end of this undeserving hate and apathy.

One person took to X (formerly Twitter) to say: “Olivia Rodrigo could be serving me in tesco and I wouldn't know it was her.”

The ‘Good 4 U’ and ‘Vampire’ singer might not be to everyone’s taste, and you can have an opinion that someone else should headline in her place - but reducing Olivia Rodrigo to a dismissive ‘who?’ is sadly not uncommon for young, female artists who have mainly young, female fanbases.

Too often, the tastes of young women are rubbished as trivial or unserious in the context of some of the world’s biggest events, despite being a huge part of the music industry. For example, millions upon millions of mostly-female fans almost shut down cities across the world during Taylor Swift’s epic Eras Tour, with the singer boosting the local economy of every city she visited on the record-breaking tour.

Emily Eavis’ clear intention with this year’s headliners is to make sure there is something for everyone - the legend that is Neil Young will bring in the older crowd and introduce a new generation to his timeless hits; The 1975 are arguably the biggest band in Britain right now and are undeniably the crowd-pleasers of the bill.

Olivia’s job as Sunday headliner is to not only make sure that women are represented on the famous Pyramid Stage (and often boys’ club), but also that gen z is. The 22-year-old is undoubtedly one of the biggest gen z artists in the world right now - despite how much faceless X accounts want to tell you otherwise.

Some of her achievements have included becoming the youngest artists ever to receive the BRIT Billion Award for achieving over one billion streams in the United Kingdom, winning three Grammy Awards, and she was named Time's Entertainer of the Year for 2021. Her 2023 second album ‘Guts’ was the year’s most critically-acclaimed record, according to the BBC. Not too shabby for someone you wouldn’t recognise in Tesco...

There’s nothing forcing you to go and watch Olivia Rodrigo if you are lucky enough to have a ticket to the world-famous festival - why not just leave those who do want to go and watch this worldwide superstar to it?