Glastonbury hits back at Jay-Z critics

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," he told the BBC. "If you start to break it then people aren't going to go. I'm sorry, but Jay-Z? No chance. Glastonbury has a tradition of guitar music. I'm not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It's wrong."

Gallagher found support on Internet forums buzzing with calls to drop Jay-Z, one of the world's biggest selling artists.

"Maybe indie kids just aren't excited about standing in the rain listening to a misogynistic gangster rapper," a contributor called Smoocher wrote on the NME Web site, www.nme.com.

Many others welcomed the appearance of Jay-Z as a breath of fresh air and blamed the slower ticket sales on overcrowding, muddy fields and commercialism.

"I much prefer smaller independent festivals -- better music, better food, nicer people and no big companies ripping you off," Daniel Salt wrote on a Reuters forum, here