Music festivals are a threatened species that could die out if they fail to adapt to the climate crisis.
While soaring insurance and production costs, disruptions to supply chains, mass cancellations and shifts in consumer buying habits have all contributed to a flailing live music scene, extreme and unpredictable weather is an underlying contributor to these factors, an RMIT University report has found.
Rain, Heat, Repeat: How Music Fans are Experiencing Extreme Weather will be released on Wednesday, with polling done by Green Music Australia and analysis done by RMIT and La Trobe University academics.
Catherine Strong, a sociologist and associate professor at RMIT, said climate change was no longer a distant threat to the live music sector; the phenomenon was already drastically reshaping audience behaviours and the live music economy.
In a single week last month 26 live music events were cancelled as the north-east seaboard of Australia prepared for Cyclone Alfred.
Some 1,155 people who attended live music events and music festivals in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania, aged between 18 and 60, were interviewed in the research. Almost one-third of interviewees said they now consulted weather forecasts before making a commitment to buy tickets to a live music event. More than one-third (34%) said extreme weather had made them more cautious about buying tickets, rising to 44% for those who described themselves as regular live music gig goers.
One in three said they would avoid attending a music festival if the temperature was forecast to hit 35C, and almost one in five said they were now purchasing ticket insurance to cover events affected by extreme weather.
Strong said the findings provided insight into why consumer behaviour has changed significantly in recent years, with concert goers delaying their purchasing longer, in turn causing some of Australia’s major music festivals to cancel due to insufficient early ticket sales.
In 2024 both Splendour in the Grass and Groovin The Moo cancelled, citing insufficient early ticket sales.
“The normal way the festival industry does business relies on a certain number of tickets to be sold early and often,” Strong said.
“People are now getting cautious enough about the weather that they’re starting to leave their ticket buying to the point where they can meaningfully look at a weather forecast, and this in turn affects how festivals can assess whether or not they are viable … and for a lot of them, that’s just not practical. A late cancellation means having to pay artists more for their cancellation fees, and it drives insurance costs up even more.”
The report found that 85% of festival goers had been affected by either floods, storms, heatwaves or the threat of bushfires at an event they had attended in the past 12 months.
The report warned this appeared to be pushing consumers into “safer” options, such as buying tickets only for large concerts in covered arenas and stadiums, venues where international artists such as Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga have the capacity to fill within hours of tickets going on sale, a capacity few locally grown acts possess.
“The sustainability of Australian musicians being able to make a career out of what they do is definitely being threatened by these trends,” Strong said.
“One of the things festivals have done is provide a space where up and coming local acts reach audiences that they wouldn’t have done otherwise. [Festivals] have been one of the stepping stones that artists have been able to take in order to build their careers.”
The bass player with the indie rock band Spacey Jane, Peppa Lane, has experienced the effects of extreme weather on the live music scene at a professional and personal level.
At the 2023 Rolling Sets music festival on the NSW Central Coast, Spacey Jane’s gig was pulled due to an electrical storm.
“All through through the day, sets were being cancelled, and then the weather cleared and the festival would start up again. It was on and off throughout the day … we ended up only playing three of our songs in what was supposed to be an hour-long set.
The previous year she had attended what she refers to as “Splendour in the Mud”, the 2022 Splendour in the Grass festival in northern NSW that left tens of thousands of festival goers bogged, stranded and out of pocket after torrential rain.
“We were up to our knees in mud,” she said.
“There’s a level where it’s fun, but if you’re camping and your tent is getting swept away, everything you have is completely drenched and you can’t get dry for three days, then it’s not really fun any more.”
Adaptations the music festival sector needed to urgently adopt included the creation of permanent weather resilient festival sites with heat shelters, flood-resistant staging and accessible water refilling stations, the report concluded.
Better communications over weather safety plans and cancellation policies were also needed, but none of these adaptations would be achieved without greater federal and state government cooperation, the report said.
