After 22 years, Virgin has announced that it's dropped sponsorship of V Festival, leaving the event's future up in the air.
In a blog post, company founder Richard Branson said that "being part of V Festival has been an honour and there are some amazing moments that will stay with me forever — including introducing Paul Weller and welcoming V2 Records' first signing The Stereophonics to a massive audience.
"Who would have thought that an idea to sell cut-price mail-order records would grow into a record label, let alone a unique music festival – and so much else besides?
"We wish Live Nation every success with their future plans. We would like to thank them for a brilliant partnership over recent years."
Branson explained that his company is pursuing other musical avenues such as Sofar Sounds and Virgin Radio.
The festival will still continue, in a sense. It will relaunch under a new sponsor and with a new name, as announced by the official V Festival Twitter account:
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"Thanks for being a great sponsor @Virgin," reads the tweet."The name of the new festival that continues on the same weekend in 2018 will be announced soon."
As long as the company sponsoring the Festival begins with a G, P or D, we're all good.
This year's Festival was headlined by P!nk and JAY-Z, the latter paying tribute to his late friend Chester Bennington of Linkin Park during his set.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he's covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I'm a Fish.
