Splendour’s cancellation will send shockwaves through Australia’s music industry

If a music festival has not shifted at least half of its tickets within the first 24 hours, the organisers know it is in trouble. If they respond to low sales by flooding the market with sponsored posts or paid advertising, the audience will soon know it too. And nothing deters a potential ticket purchaser like the smell of a dud event.

That, says a senior music industry source who has intimate knowledge of the sector but was not authorised to speak on the record, is the harsh reality of the modern music festival industry. It sits at odds with changes in audience behaviour – a recent report by Tixel/Bolster found that one-third of music attendees are buying tickets later, and almost a quarter are waiting until one to two weeks out from an event.And it is why, for the second time in less than two months, an event once thought too big to fail has been cancelled barely a week after tickets went on sale.

“Everything is driven by social media, analytics, and algorithms now,” they say. “And that means within 10 minutes of a line-up being announced – even before tickets have gone on sale – you can tell if you’re in trouble.”

By Wednesday, the organisers of one of Australia’s longest-running and largest music festivals, Splendour in the Grass, knew they were in strife. Two weeks after the line-up (with Kylie Minogue headlining) was announced, and six days after general tickets went on sale, they realised they were staring at a major loss for the 2024 edition.

At 4pm, about three hours after this masthead broke the news, Splendour – which is owned by Secret Sounds, in turn majority owned by the giant US-based music management and touring company Live Nation and promoted by Triple J – officially announced the three-day festival (with a nominal capacity of 50,000 per day) scheduled for Byron Bay in July had been cancelled, due to “unexpected events”.

To anyone following the festival scene, the news was all too familiar. It also came just two days after federal arts minister Tony Burke had asked the House of Representatives standing committee on communications and the arts “to inquire into and report on the challenges and opportunities within the Australian live music industry”.

Since 2020, more than 20 festivals have been relocated, postponed or cancelled outright, many as a result of extreme weather events including rain, flood, heat and fires. That is on top of the enormous disruption wrought by COVID during 2020 and 2021.

Just last month, regional touring festival Groovin the Moo pulled the pin on its April/May season, citing poor ticket sales. Dark Mofo (Hobart) and Falls Festival have also gone on (unscheduled) hiatus this year.

Three weeks ago, attendees at Pitch in central Victoria endured extreme heat, conflicting messages about whether it was safe to attend or not, and disruptions and delays before the event was finally called off – three days into a five-day schedule. (A note on the festival’s website now advises that “as the circumstances in which Pitch 2024 was cancelled are so unique, the refund process will take time”.)

Bluesfest is going ahead as planned this weekend in Byron Bay – with ticket sales up on last year, according to promoter Peter Noble – but across the sector at large the outlook hasn’t looked this glum since the collapse of Big Day Out and Soundwave almost a decade ago.

What we are witnessing now, says the insider, is an echo of that earlier shake-up. “That was all driven by big egos paying too much for the big acts, to the point where they couldn’t possibly make it work financially,” they say. “What’s going on now, though, is all about social media.”

Rightly or wrongly, much of the chatter in response to Splendour and Groovin The Moo focused on line-ups judged to be lacking a strong enough headline act. But landing a headliner big enough to pull tens of thousands of people to a remote location hundreds of kilometres away, at great personal cost, has never been harder.

“Along with soaring operational costs [including insurance premiums] that are impacting festivals, the difficulty of securing international artists for Australian promoters is harder than it has ever been,” says Adelle Robinson, chair of the Australian Festival Association.

A weak Australian dollar makes fees offered by festival promoters less attractive than they were, as does the fact that travel costs – often borne by the artist – are so high. Add the instability of the festival market to the equation, and it’s easy to see why some acts might prefer to go it alone.

“Headline tours have become more attractive to high-tier acts, as they get a bigger return on investment,” says Robinson. “Festival shows, however, are a very important part of the artist life cycle. A festival is where breakthrough acts can prove themselves to new audiences. The format of a festival means exposure to larger audiences outside of an artist’s core market. It is a place to discover new music.”

But the emergence of digital channels of discovery – Spotify and TikTok chief among them – has disrupted that life cycle. It is now possible for some artists to leapfrog the stepping stone of the festival circuit entirely.

A case in point is Fred Again, who played as a mid-bill act at Laneway last year but has recently sold out three nights in arenas in both Sydney and Melbourne.Promoter Handsome Tours claimed more than 1 million people tried to buy tickets for the shows, which sold out in less than an hour. All up, more than 100,000 tickets, at around $180 a pop, were sold. Not all of that $18 million gross went to the artist, of course, but Fred’s cut (likely around 30 per cent) would have been way more than he could have expected from even the most lucrative headline slot on any Australian festival.

The strength of tours like his and Taylor Swift’s is evidence that despite all the talk of the very real cost-of-living pressures facing young music fans, they will still shell out for the right act. But increasingly, they are less inclined to turn up for an all-you-can-hear buffet of music from acts they might never have heard of before.

Danny Rogers, co-founder of Laneway, says there’s a sweet spot that any festival offering needs to hit.

“If I see a lineup and don’t see three or four acts I want to see, why would I want to buy a ticket,” he says. “If you don’t have the right headliners and you don’t have the Venn diagram [of crossover appeal], then you’re just splashing a bunch of acts on a lineup.”

In the course of a year, Fred Again has gone from a mid-bill festival act to a performer capable of selling out arenas on his own.Credit: Brian Purnell/Mushroom Creative House

Increasingly, says Dr Sam Whiting, a lecturer in creative industries at the University of South Australia, younger audiences are less inclined to want to pay to see acts they don’t already know.

“The multi-genre, multi-stage festival that offers a little bit of something for everyone is on the way out, because the way we access and consume new music is much more curated and much more specific to our tastes,” he says.

“The something-for-everyone approach isn’t as appealing as narrowcasting to a very dedicated fan base that is going to turn out every time, like heavy metal fans, like dance music fans, like other genre-specific audiences.”

Veteran music journalist Mikey Cahill has been around long enough to see festivals come and go before. But this “feels different”, he says. “It’s hard to see Splendour coming back.”

Some of it is down to the changing behaviours of young people, who are – or have been – the lifeblood of the festival circuit.

“Kids don’t drink as much alcohol and there is less vibe to go to festivals because (a) it’s a costly day and everyone is hurting from Cozzie Livs [cost of living pressures]; (b) there may be clashes with acts on at the same time, thus disappointment in what the punter has paid for; and (c) attending a festival is a big, gruelling day that requires precision organisation, resilience in extreme weather conditions (a huge factor!) and, let’s be frank, kids have gone a bit soft.”

Faced with what appears to be an existential crisis to a sector that employs many thousands of people in a huge variety of locations (many regional), there have been calls from some quarters for government intervention.

The Greens have called for “urgent funding to support festivals and the arts through the cost-of-living crisis”, while the Australian Festival Association has urged the federal government to “substantially increase and continue the Live Music Australia grants for festivals” in the upcoming budget, and for state governments to offer festivals “time-limited funding to help us through the next two seasons”.

But not everyone is so sure that’s the right move.

“The festival market is over-saturated,” says Whiting. “I would say this is an inevitable weaning. All markets shift eventually and change, and I think we’re just going through a transition period at the moment.”

Most at risk are regional events, because of the costs of importing staff and infrastructure to areas that generally do not have great capacity, and the broad-spectrum events. But music festivals of some stripe will likely remain part of the cultural landscape, he predicts.

“These big behemoths are probably going to go the way of the dinosaur, but I’m optimistic there is a capacity for smaller niche events,” Whiting says. “On the whole, we might actually see the net festival event sector increase. We’re just going to see fewer of these major massive events.”

The festival insider is optimistic too.

“In a decade or two we might look back at the big multi-day, multi-stage festival as a weird thing of this particular period,” they say. “This kind of event might have had its time, but I don’t think this is the end of music festivals generally. Young people will find a different form that suits them better, as they should.”

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