2024 has proven itself to be a landmark year for music. The rise and rise of Chappell Roan has ignited a whimsical spark amongst even the most jaded pop naysayers. Charli xcx ‘brat’ cycle has reached peak cultural phenomenon status. Billie Eilish’s creative streak has delivered a slew of generation-defining hits, and of course, the record-breaking Eras Tour continues to strike a hefty emotional chord with fans globally.
However, while this excitement dominates our FYPs, the news surrounding major festival cancellations has cast a grey shadow over Aussie music lovers. Over the last eighteen months, Falls Festival, Splendour In The Grass, Groovin the Moo, Spilt Milk, Bluesfest, Harvest Rock and more have all announced indefinite hiatuses from the touring cycle or axed events entirely.
Each festival cited different reasons, but it’s clear financial costs are one of them. A study from Creative Australia released in April this year found it costs $3.9 million on average to run a music festival, with one in three festivals that operated between 2022 and 2023 reporting a deficit. Almost half (47%) of festivals involved in the survey noted that rising operational costs have severely impacted running events, while 31% specifically called out rising costs associated with insurance, police, and security requirements — not to mention climate change-induced weather events — creating difficulty.
On top of that, punters have been slow to return to festivals post-pandemic. The same report found Aussies are attending fewer music events than pre-2020, with 55% saying the cost of tickets was the main barrier to attendance.
And yet — some festivals are thriving. So what’s the secret? We asked the industry players making it work in 2024 to find out.
How are music events thriving in 2024?
Most punters will be well acquainted with the life-changing and life-affirming experiences music festivals can bring — moments spent with friends, watching your favourite artists while the realities of everyday life wait on the other side of the weekend are genuinely priceless.
On a less emotional and more practical note, festivals are an integral and essential part of the live music ecosystem, providing major opportunities for local artists, industry workers, vendors, and tourism to regional towns.
Last year saw Texas-based festival South by Southwest (SXSW) launch in Sydney, bringing the likes of Chance The Rapper, Japanese punk band Otoboke Beaver, viral sensations Flyanna Boss and 200 more artists to hit the stage across various gigs and panels.
For SXSW Sydney’s Head Of Music Claire Collins, the success was all about tapping into the insatiable hunger people have for a renewed spark in Sydney’s nightlife culture.
“It was so thrilling to see Sydney lean into the hundreds of events going on,” she told PEDESTRIAN.TV. “The number one comment I heard was that, ‘Sydney hasn’t been this fun since the Olympics’.”
Originating in Austin, SXSW isn’t your average outdoor multi-stage event. In the US, artists like Amy Winehouse, The Flaming Lips, The White Stripes and more all delivered career-igniting sets at the festival over the years — the sort of stuff that would’ve sent hipster blogs into pandemonium and created that pre-social media word-of-mouth swell. It’s a highly curated event that caters to those obsessed with the ‘next’ in culture, and last year sold almost 35,000 tickets in Australia.
“We have a fairly unique model that is really about music discovery — about that ‘I saw them first’ moment,” Collins continued, revealing that she saw Billie Eilish play to “about 30 people” in 2017.”
SXSW Sydney is returning to Australia for 2024, with Collins saying she’s “optimistic” about the future of events.
“I think that we are in a transition period: if there are no events to play, international agents and artist teams will reset their fee expectations and a new generation of promoters and music lovers will put on new events to cater to fans. It’s all cyclical.”
NSW boutique festival Lost Paradise is one of the few multi-day events going strong, but founder Simon Beckingham admits costs have been tricky to navigate, revealing they needed to be “more aggressive” in offers to secure talent for the 2024 lineup.
“We’ve been working on increasing the capacity for two years now, so hopefully, that will come to fruition, allowing us to gently grow the event to meet these rising costs while continuing to deliver a product that satisfies our guests,” he told PEDESTRIAN.TV.
The three-day festival welcomes 15,000 punters to the Glenworth Valley each New Year, with a focus on buzzworthy house and techno artists, nostalgic, left-field pop icons and big-tent indie acts (this year’s lineup includes more mainstream-leaning Aussie acts Fischer and Flight Facilities, alongside Berlin trance act Marlon Hoffstadt, UK house artist Denis Sulta, UK garage DJ Sammy Virji).
The real key to Lost Paradise’s success in a tricky market, Beckingham says, is about providing “a strong sense of community, experiential experiences, and something out of the ordinary” from your typical festival.
“More than ever, understanding your audience is crucial,” says Beckingham.
“Our audience generally comes as part of larger social groups of friends, then meet one another and make new friends year on year.”
Most folks who’ve been to a camping festival know that it’s the moments in between the noise of the mainstage that you end up reminiscing on for years after you leave — moments that the LP team work tirelessly to create.
“[We want punters to experience that] chance encounter, a great chat in the campsite, a pottery lesson in Shambhala Fields, an adventure through the festival after dark, a NYE kiss, or just meeting like-minded friends both new and old,” says Beckingham.
On a smaller scale, the team behind Transgenre, a local mini-festival platforming trans, non-binary and gender-diverse artists, are also well aware of the importance of community in running a successful fest. Founders Tim Blunt and Ellie Robinson wanted to create something for people who “were desperately longing for a space where our community could flourish and appreciate one another in a joyous and hopeful way”, explained Blunt.
“After decades of trans and queer communities having our pleas flatly ignored for Australian festivals to curate lineups that actually reflect their audiences, we finally decided to take matters into our own hands,” Blunt continued.
The 2023 all-ages event sold out and saw acts like Cry Club, Those Who Dream, FVNERAL, Cherish, and more hit the stage. While Blunt recognises that the cost of living crisis is a significant barrier towards people attending live music right now, they also believe that mainstream festivals struggle to reflect the diversity in their audiences.
“I think punters are making it pretty clear that what’s being offered simply isn’t worth the price of admission. While I agree that there’s certainly a level of fragility for the bigger, mainstream festivals, we shouldn’t pretend that people aren’t going to see live music at all — they’re just seeking it out in spaces and communities that have historically and continue to be neglected by the music industry,” they said.
Transgenre 2023 was a labour of pure love and passion, with both Robinson and Blunt putting their personal finances on the line, and calling in favours from friends to serve their wider community, with the goal of seeing their platform blossom.
“It’s fucking expensive to just exist as a trans person — gender-affirming care is an all but self-funded endeavour, so Ellie and I had to plunge ourselves into personal debt and work our asses off to try and claw ourselves out of the red. I should note that while it was an anxiety-fueled struggle, there’s a huge amount of privilege required to even be able to consider taking that risk. We knew that before the festival’s first edition we didn’t have any evidence that it would be successful, so hopefully now that we do it’ll only grow.”
These ideas of belonging and curating moments for a specific community aren’t new — they just fell to the wayside as multi-genre mega-fests took precedence throughout the ’00s.
The birth of the modern music festival as we know it, 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival, was based on the foundation of celebrating the counter-cultural hippie and flower power movement of the time, attracting 90,000 people. Years down the line, the Vans Warped Tour, the largest and longest-ever running touring festival, was founded on DIY and punk roots and dedicated its run to showcasing pop punk, emo, metalcore and hardcore bands. The Australian heavy music scene has also successfully championed this notion for years, and currently, the success of Sydney hardcore luminaries Speed is that nurturing a community trumps all.
There’s no way of completely knowing whether the festivals getting cancelled just missed the mark culturally or whether they’re another domino falling amidst an economic crisis.
In music, being at the right place at the right time matters, and striking while the zeitgeist is hot is everything. However, community, culture, and identity are the cornerstones of why people want to be part of something bigger than themselves, and this theory has been proven correct time and time again.
Main image: Getty
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