PJ Harvey will be performing at Glastonbury Festival, 26-30th June 2024.

baffling how she isn't the headline act but okay i guess

Probably because Polly Jean Harvey is an established artist in her own right. Maybe the organizers of the Glastonbury festival wanted to have Shania Twain and others to headline.

The others have more mainstream appeal, and this is a very mainstream festival...

still a joke haha

Baffling to think she’d get a headline spot over Colplay or SZA, now c’mon now, let’s be realistic lol

not going further into this as it's pointless, but i'm talking just from my perspective really, and because of the respect i think she deserves for who she is.
also Björk, for example, always headlines these festivals and she is as popular as Polly, as far as i'm concerned. but to each their own

Don’t mean to fight lol! But if you compare their streaming numbers (which for better or worse is a pretty accurate metric in 2024), Björk has like 50% bigger audience than Polly nowadays so this translates to better/more prestige time slots at such events.

However, not even Björk is headlining these big mainstream festivals—for instance, her orchestral set at Coachella last year was basically her ‘opening’ for a (half-assed!) Frank Ocean show.

But I understand your perspective—I also sometimes wish Polly or Björk would be headlining Glastonbury or Coachella or Primavera, instead of fucking Colplay or Shania—but that’s the way it is. They might be considered classic/legacy acts by now but their mainstream appeal will always remain somehow limited (and that’s part of the reason I love both of them, of course).

(Also, at these huge festivals usually the small print is more interesting than most of the headliners—just here, Alvvays, Squid, Mdou Moctar, Arooj Aftab, Mannequin Pussy, Bar Italia, Brittany Howard, etc.—all probably worth seeing live more than Dua Lipa)

yeah maybe i'm too much in my own bubble it's just because both have such a solid fanbase.
also björk was the first woman to headline coachella though, and she did so twice. i think she didn't do it last time because of the structure of the orchestral show, which is unplugged.
but yes in an ideal world these artists who are put in the smaller lines definitely would be the headliners