Byron Bay Bluesfest: blue skies beyond 2025 as Peter Noble changes tune
When music festival director Peter Noble announced in August that Bluesfest 2025 would mark the finale of the long-running event, he was near the end of his tether. What’s changed?
When music festival director Peter Noble announced in August that Bluesfest 2025 would mark the finale of the long-running event, he was near the end of his tether.
Two years of successive “big losses”, for its under-attended 2023 and 2024 events, meant that the veteran promoter could not see a future for his award-winning, multi-genre festival.
“As much as it pains me to say this, it’s time to close this chapter,” said Noble at the time. “As I said earlier this year at Bluesfest 2024, next year’s festival will be happening and it definitely is, but it will be our last.”
His choice of language was clear and decisive: 2025 would mark the 36th and final edition.
“What I’ve been saying since August is that we’re fighting and doing our best to keep the festival alive,” Noble told The Australian on Thursday. “At that point in time, it did look like the next one was the end. I had no crystal ball that would have told me the incredible media response – as well as ticket-buying response from the public – which took us from a very low point, after losing millions of dollars at the last festival.”
“We were at a very low point, along with the rest of the industry; we were fighting for our survival,” he said.
Yet in a surprising shift that reflects the volatile nature of the Australian live music market, the outstanding ticket sales recorded in response to that alarming announcement will allow Bluesfest to run beyond its supposed curtain call.
In fact, Noble is so buoyed by the market response to next year’s Bluesfest – to be held from April 17-20 at Byron Events Farm, near Byron Bay – that he’s looking to book acts for the 2026 edition.
All of which means that next year’s artistic line-up – topped by acts such as Crowded House, Hilltop Hoods, Missy Higgins, Vance Joy, Ocean Alley and Tones and I – won’t represent the festival’s last hurrah after all.
Having been boosted by a crowd response of about 90,000 ticket sales – as audiences flocked to what they understood would be the last chance to enjoy its unique melting pot of rock, pop, blues, hip-hop and country music – the promoter has now changed his tune.
When asked whether he was concerned that some 2025 ticket buyers might feel hoodwinked by his earlier statements surrounding the festival’s finality, Noble became defensive.
“If you want to take that angle, I won’t do an interview with you, mate,” he said. “Sorry.”
“If you want to ask those sort of questions, I’m not going to answer them,” he said. “How about the truth? People said, ‘We don’t want you to finish.’ They bought tickets. I’m not looking to be bashed again, and be put out of business. If that’s what you’re going to write something about, go ahead.”
“We have been saying, within days of my initial statement, that we’re fighting for our future, and we really want to continue,” he said. “That is the truth.”
“Go take a bash on me, mate,” said Noble, 75. “I may as well walk any-bloody-way, because I’m at a point where I feel so disincentivised in this industry. I’m one of the best in the business, mate; I bloody am. The way they treat me, you feel like you’re just a doormat.”
One of the festival director’s biggest ongoing complaints is what he claims is a lack of state government funding support for events such as his, which have long attracted significant tourism dollars to both regional and state treasury coffers.
“I have no high hopes my discussions with the NSW government are going to lead to anywhere,” he said. “It’s like you go into this maze, and they keep telling you that there’s some cheese at the end – and you get to the end of the maze, and there’s nothing there, time and again.”
How much proverbial cheese was he asking for?
“How much would I like?” Noble replied. “Enough money to secure two or three headliners every year, and be able to trade profitably and continue to bring $100-plus million into this state of NSW [annually], from across borders or coming to our region, so that this continues. I mean, why wouldn’t that be a no-brainer?”
Toward the end of the phone interview, Noble said, “I’m not a bad person; I’m not a crook. I’m a cultural entrepreneur. I don’t even do this for the money; if I did it for the money I would have retired years ago, because we’re not making any.”
Bluesfest, he said, suffered “big losses in ‘23 and ‘24; ‘22 was a big return [after its 2021 Covid cancellation], and then the whole thing went south.”
“And hey, it’s the Reserve Bank,” he said. “Why has Canada, the UK and the US addressed their interest rates and reduced them, and Australia hasn’t? Why? Those of us in business ask that question all the time.”
Asked whether the 90,000 or so tickets sold for the 2025 edition of Bluesfest will result in a profitable event, Noble replied, “I expect it to be, yes. But we had no expectation of that until those tickets were bought. We have to put an event on based on the economic outcome, and everyone’s got to be a bit conservative right now. We want to survive.”
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