Is The Aussie Music Festival Scene Dead?

Cancelled

A few of the largest Australian music festivals have been suddenly canceled over the last decade, marking a trend, that has alarmed the Australian music communities. Some of these venues have announced that it was their final production for a series, as others have just canceled outright. Some of the well-established, having succumbed, are the renowned Falls Festival, Groove in The Moo, and Spender in The Grass. With these cancellations, there were a total of somewhere between 30 - 40 other events that threw in the towel, including Australian cultural icons such as Big Day Out in 2014, Sound Wave in 2015, and Stereosonic in 2016, respectively contributing to the foreboding demise of the music festival industry.

 The Downturn

With the massive increases in costs and plummeting ticket sales, the pain incurred from a global pandemic, and the devastating rains of 2022, festivals have been left lying on the mat, dazed, looking up at the referee giving the 10-count for a knockout. Morale, overall, has pretty much tanked for the festival industry. Especially, with astronomical costs of between 30-40 %, and rising, demands for staffing venues, and procuring music artists for performances. Also, to add insult to injury, how about those ridiculous, ever-increasing insurance premiums?

Passing the costs on to the patronage is a common strategy to work around the high costs of doing business, like increasing the ticket prices, and cutting various corners to bring down overheads, but this is cause and effect territory, where one can only hope to bring in more revenue from a captured audience through the means of using common business strategies like merchandising, concessions, and beverages. But this does not always pan out as there is a downturn in these areas also.

Survival Strategies

To have a successful festival, it is crucial, for event proprietors to engage in preplanning and logistics. This all has to be formulated well in advance of ticket sales. It also behooves, the organizers, to monitor the exits, as per analytics, as this is a telltale sign of retention rates and the overall health of the event.

For some organizers, they are facing a real soul-searching conundrum. Like, rolling dice in a game of craps. The gambling stakes are high, and the odds are looking pretty ugly. You can either cancel the event and lose a nice chunk of revenues or don’t cancel the event and lose up to three or four times the amount.

To illustrate one scenario, there was a report that in early 2024, the organizers of the Coastal Jam, hosted in the Mornington Peninsula, in a move to preserve the company from going under, I mean, way down under, canceled the event. It was a costly move, but it stopped the financial gangrene from consuming the company to live and fight another day.

For up-and-coming artists, the current environment is a sad state of affairs for gaining any real exposure, like performing for their fans and establishing new ones. Festivals are great venues for showcasing talent but with the low attendance rates and cancellations, it’s getting pretty dire out there.

Getting Government Involved

Is there help on the way? Many event organizers have joined forces with activists to petition the Australian government, in a bid to stem the crisis to help prevent more event cancellations and thus save the industry from a total collapse.

Given that the ecological system within the realm of the music festival business is a self-sustaining one, meaning that everyone works together as one whole organism. Everyone in the community relies on each other’s contributions to function uniformly. From contractors, venue operators, marketers, vendors, and suppliers, right down to the performing artists. The crisis affecting it now is eating away at its vitality.

So, when it comes to mitigating this crisis, government intervention, many believe, is the only solution.

Government, Pandemic & Big Money

However, there are some with differing views and arguments. Some organizers see this crisis as fallout. One where a ‘false economy’ has manifested through the means of ‘government support’ stepping in during the pandemic setting the stage for several financial abuses within live music events. The argument is that, as some believe, the result of infused government monies created more confidence in some ‘promoters’ and other parties, to go all out bigger and better, which resulted in squeezing out the little guys. With the minimum amount of international talent coming to Australia, the bids were getting to a point where it was not practical for most proprietors.

When it comes to craving those big government Teets, huge international companies like ‘Live Nation’, which just happens to be the majority owner of Secret Sounds, were able to ‘massively’ outspend smaller promoters and put on a lot more events, thus making their tickets sales a lot cheaper.

Is This The Final Curtain?

Is the festival event business a ‘rigged’ operation? Some promoters believe so. It seems, that from their perspective, the environment is getting quite hostile for small businesses, and government overreach is not helping, causing a nasty financial squeeze, on the live music scene that was once a thriving and vibrant free-spirited community.

Yeah, but on the other hand, some believe that it’s just a ‘market correction’, due to the over-saturation of events. There is a lot of confusion, and it seems that for the moment, there is no agreement on how to rectify the situation.

Meanwhile, there is the fear that the next generation of talented up-and-coming artists will not have an environment in which to be discovered.

I guess we will just have to wait and see how this all pans out in the coming months or years.

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