At this year's Oxegen you could buy a collapsible armchair, or some fresh fruit, or even a new wardrobe. You could have your head shaved while learning the benefits of folic acid. Or watch BMX stunts, perhaps, before ogling an exhibition of lovingly pimped out rides? Time permitting, you might have even caught some music.
If Punchestown sometimes resembled an elaborate corporate souk more than a music festival, 70,000 revellers seemed untroubled, knowing that even when the bands finish, the brands play on.
A week after Live8, though, in which music modestly aimed to change the world, it's a bit of a comedown. How hollow does the festival imperative sound to "make some noise" in the fading echoes to "make poverty history"?
Music for music's sake however, will always sound worthwhile with a new band like Dublin four-piece, Director. Their hook-laden pomp rock rings out with the adolescent understanding that if people always let you down, electric guitars never will.
It takes the catchfire success of Leeds Britpop revivalists Kaiser Chiefs to get the festival truly started. With a career accelerating quicker than the manic rhythms of Na Na Na Na Na and I Predict a Riot, you can understand frontman Ricky Wilson's good-humoured hubris when cautioning an unruly mosh pit.
Such ardour noticeably cools, however, for an unusually bloodless Razorlight, capturing the confusion of the day by dedicating one song to "anal sex", the next to "making poverty history".
The day seems distracted; the air hanging warm and thick, dark clouds looming like a constant threat. So why shouldn't the stoner grooves and fuzzy gangsta rap of Snoop Dogg draw the biggest response of the day? "It's not Dublin?" drawls the
lightly-
informed Long Beach rapper amid the theatrical fug of Gin and Juice and Drop It Like It's Hot.
Snoop becomes the hero of the day with a question we have all asked at one time or another: What's My Name?
No such short-term memory loss for the divine KT Tunstall, whose rapturous set is enough to keep the bludgeoning metal of Queens of the Stone Age at bay.
Time marches on at the Ticket Stage, and while New York's The Bravery come off as oddly lily-livered, Bloc Party follow with intelligence and power, brains and brawn.
They are suffering "technical hitches" and "feedback issues" singer Kele Okereke informs us, before referring to us as "the UK" (that'll be a technical hitch) and then earning a shower of boos (that'll be a feedback issue). They recover magnificently with a syncopated Helicopter, a taut Pioneers and a steady demolishing of their equipment.
You have to hand it to Green Day. Following 14 years as mall-rat punks, the bristling political surliness of American Idiot has given them a new lease of life. In a set both slick and throwaway, the mascara-caked Billie Joe Armstrong balanced an attention-deficit epic like Jesus of Suburbia with the disarming tactic of hauling three amateur musicians onstage to take over.
Indie darlings Kasabian and the dragging post-punk of Interpol might have offered convincing alternatives, but in Basket Case, Boulevard of Broken Dreams and invigoratingly unlikely covers of Shout and We Are the Champions, Green Day's fissile punk was the perfect accompaniment for the divided attentions and the splitting soundtrack of today.