Tickets for next year’s Glastonbury Festival will go on sale tomorrow, six months earlier than usual, prompted by slow sales for this year’s event. About 100,000 tickets for the five-day music festival will be available online tomorrow. The remaining tickets will go on sale in April.

For the first time music fans will be able to put down a £50 deposit as well as pay in full, and they will also be allowed to buy six tickets each instead of the normal four.

This summer only 100,000 passes were purchased when the ticket office opened in April. The remaining 35,000 were sold in the last few days before the festival began. It was the first time that all the tickets had failed to sell on the day of release since the late 1990s. The poor weather and the controversial booking of Jay-Z, the US rapper, as the headline act were blamed.

Michael Eavis, the festival’s organiser, said: “We have come up with a scheme that will allow people a much longer period to plan and pay for their tickets, while still continuing the battle against ticket touting.”

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