On Wednesday, after a day of fevered speculation, Splendour in the Grass announced it was cancelling this year’s festival, just a week after tickets went on sale. The long-running camping festival was set to return to the North Byron Parklands in New South Wales in July, headlined by Kylie Minogue, Future and Arcade Fire. But “unexpected events” were to blame, Splendour’s co-chief executives Jessica Ducrou and Paul Piticco said in their only statement. They said the festival would be “taking a year off” while conspicuously not committing to returning in 2025 (Splendour did not respond to Guardian Australia’s requests for further comment for this article).
The news was another blow to Australia’s already embattled festival scene, coming a month after the regional festival Groovin The Moo cancelled all six dates because of insufficient ticket sales. These cancellations happened during a summer in which numerous festivals faced extreme weather conditions, including Pitch and Golden Plains in Victoria and Womadelaide in South Australia. Against this backdrop, Splendour’s decision has left the industry reeling.
Before Splendour’s cancellation, I was speaking to people in the Australian festival space to ask why multi-genre festivals are failing to attract ticket buyers. The responses include: a scarcity of available and willing headline artists in the global market; a squeeze on budgets as the Australian dollar weakens; generation Z’s preference for sure-thing headline shows; and a growing trend towards festivals that offer a sense of community, not just collective experience.
But every conversation came to the same conclusion: there’s no one definitive thing that got us here.
Headline headaches
“Gone are the days when people read from top to bottom of a lineup,” says an Australian festival promoter, who spoke under the condition of anonymity. “In media and on socials, it’s really the top artists driving most of the heat.”
For Splendour, one of those top artists was mired in controversy. Five people have made allegations of sexual misconduct against Arcade Fire’s frontman Win Butler (Butler has denied the allegations and no charges have been laid against him). Groovin The Moo, meanwhile, arranged its lineup alphabetically to sidestep the headliner debate.
“It’s really difficult for any festival in Australia to secure what people consider headline talent right now,” the festival promoter says. “Previously, between 60 to 70% of offers you made would confirm, and now it’s probably like 20 to 30%.”
They point to “a multitude of factors” behind this change, including artists prioritising a booming touring market in the US or simply choosing to stay home for their mental health.
“If fans are asking why a festival didn’t book a certain artist, it’s not because they somehow didn’t think of them,” the promoter adds. “If the artist makes sense stylistically, there’s no way they haven’t had an offer out at some stage.”
Punters, meanwhile, “are looking at the top two or three artists to decide if it’s something they need to see”, the promoter says. “The Groovin The Moo lineup wasn’t bad, but with Billie Eilish on top it would’ve been a totally different story.”
Money troubles
Other observers point to the ballooning operational costs for post-pandemic festivals, which makes competing for expensive headliners especially risky. (Some point to the end of the Australian government’s Rise fund, which gave festivals an injection of funds after Covid-19.) As Mitch Wilson, managing director of the Australian Festival Association, told Triple J’s Hack on Wednesday: “Australian festivals are really struggling at the moment because of the strength of the Australian dollar – it’s actually not that attractive at the moment, given where the dollar is at, for an artist to come all of this way, and travel costs are through the roof.”
Notably, Secret Sounds, the Australian company behind Splendour, is majority owned by the US giant Live Nation, which reported its biggest profits yet in 2023.
“In Australia, as elsewhere, there’s been an increasing market concentration and dominance of three major multinationals, one of which is Live Nation,” says Ben Green, a researcher at Griffith University who specialises in live music crisis and change. “You might think if anyone could keep a festival going, it’s the world’s biggest promoter. However, you can also expect a distant, multinational corporate group to be guided by the brutal facts of the financial situation in a given year, and might place that above the long-term strength of the brand and the local impact.”
While cost-of-living concerns might explain the turn away from expensive tickets, recent blockbuster tours from Taylor Swift, Blink-182, Pink and especially Fred Again (whose surprise Australia tour sold 100,000 tickets – two Splendours’ worth – in 24 hours) tell a different story.
“A major artist in a major venue is a safe bet,” Green says. “People know if they buy a ticket for Taylor Swift in a stadium, it’s actually going to go ahead at the time and date that’s been promised. Whereas it’s understandable that people may have lost confidence in outdoor events in particular.”
‘Australian artists are copping it’
This fervour around international headliners has had a profound impact on Australian artists vying for festival bookings. Julia Robinson, Aria’s head of policy and advocacy, says it’s incredibly hard at the moment for Australian artists to cut through. While overall music sales grew by 10% in 2023, only three singles in the top 100 were by Australian artists.
“Music here is valuable, but directing more of that value to Australian musicians continues to be a challenge in such a crowded market,” Robinson says. “Right now, it means the festival market – a critical part of the Australian music ecosystem – is forced to operate in effective market failure, paying increasingly high fees while contending with the same financial difficulties faced by all Australian businesses.”
Maggie Collins, the executive director of the Association of Artist Managers Australia, echoes this sentiment. “Australian artists are copping it from all angles,” she says. “Anecdotally, Australian acts who are programmed on Splendour take their entire fee and spend it on production, because it’s a platform to perform in front of thousands of people who may never have been interested in seeing them. That’s how Splendour is regarded by artists and their teams.”
While Collins hopes there’s a positive to follow this “dark turn”, for now she says “the artist management community is just a bit shocked”. “It’s like we’re on a treadmill that keeps going faster and faster, but we keep falling behind.”
But both Robinson and Collins agree that reconnecting Australian fans with local artists will help, so they can start building the audiences that will make them headline-level drawcards.
A clear trend in the last few years has been a growing appetite for smaller, genre-specific festivals over the multi-genre affairs that were once a rite-of-passage for Australian festivalgoers and would reliably sell out on the basis of their broad appeal. (The most iconic festival of this class, Big Day Out, bowed out in 2014.) This year’s Groovin The Moo was set to span indie rock to old-school hip-hop, while Splendour’s 2024 lineup was ambitiously varied, including buzzy acts like Girl in Red, Omar Apollo, Turnstile and Lizzy McAlpine alongside proven locals G Flip and Tash Sultana.
Emal Naim is one of the founders of Festco, whose new festival Souled Out sold out 15,000 tickets at its first stop in Sydney. Headlined by Summer Walker, Bryson Tiller and PartyNextDoor, its lineup was laser focused on contemporary R&B.
“We target a demographic of people that have never been targeted before in this country,” Naim says. “Going to a multi-genre festival for a specific talent can be hard to justify, but our audience gets to see everyone on their Spotify playlist.” This contraction is increasingly true in the dance music world, too, with the likes of Stereosonic and Future Music Festival making way for smaller subgenre-specific events such as this weekend’s Melbourne offshoot of the Dutch house and techno festival Dekmantel.
Of course, the forces behind Splendour’s woes are not specific to Australia – as evidenced by Coachella experiencing its slowest-ever ticket sales in 10 years.
“If Coachella can’t put together a lineup that people are happy with, what chance do we have in Australia where a dollar is worth half the amount?” the festival promoter says.
Across all my conversations, it’s clear the industry at large was rooting for Splendour’s success as a bellwether for what’s to come for Australia’s festival scene. The path forward now is more uncertain than ever.
