The Aireys Inlet Music Festival on Victoria's Surf Coast has been running 18 years, but every year it faces a risk.
It's one rainy weekend away from never happening again, according to musician Ed Prendergast, who helps run the event.
He's explained to a parliamentary inquiry into Australia's live music industry the precarious situation the festival faces each year.
With a commitment to paying artists commercial rates, and punters putting off buying tickets until the last minute, a weekend of bad weather could result in losses in the thousands, he said.
"You're just one bad day away from losing $10,000 or whatever it might be because the commitment is that all the costs are fixed," he told the inquiry on Thursday.
For the Wide Open Space Festival, held an hour from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, last minute ticket sales had created cash flow problems.
Succession planning to keep the event going in the long term was also a concern, the festival's Jimmy Cocking said.
"Who is going to be prepared to take the risk one day when my family says, 'You can't put the house on the line anymore to keep it going,'" he said.
Another big challenge for Wide Open Space has been transport. The festival had years of growth thanks to cheap flights to Alice Springs with Tiger Airways, which collapsed in 2020.
Just before the most recent festival earlier in 2024, the airline Bonza went under too.
It is festivals such as these where Australian musicians start out before launching international careers, and the picture for those who make it that far could not be more different.
The latest figures from national music rights management organisation APRA AMCOS show record international earnings for songwriters and composers of more than $86 million in the 2023/24 financial year, up 22.5 per cent.
Australian artists made it to the biggest international stages: hearts went Padam Padam for Kylie Minogue when she won a Grammy for Best Pop Dance recording, with Dom Dolla and Troye Sivan also in the mix.
Tones and I also became the first woman to reach three billion streams on Spotify, for her earworm Dance Monkey.
Overall, royalty revenue hit a new high of $740 million, up 7.2 per cent.
But revenues for live performances are still languishing at pre-COVID levels, with an estimated $600 million in lost income for artists.
