It was meant to be a big moment for Blink18Who, a tribute act to California pop punk band Blink-182. The trio from Shropshire should have spent this Sunday evening wowing a 7,000-strong sold-out crowd at the Wannasee Penrith festival in Cumbria. But they heard last week that the entire event had been cancelled because the rainy summer had left the site “saturated” and treacherous.
The cancellation crowns a difficult summer for Britain’s vibrant – and crowded – music festival industry. The Leeds and Reading festivals have drawn almost 200,000 fans between them this weekend, and Glastonbury – standard ticket £360 – entertained about 210,000, but their smaller counterparts (most UK festivals sell between 5,000 and 20,000 tickets) have experienced a storm of problems from competition and poor weather to cost headaches.
So far this year, 60 festivals have been postponed or cancelled, up from 36 last year, according to the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF). And since 2019, when there were 630 festivals across the country, 192 have disappeared.
Many of the reasons are well documented: post-Brexit talent shortages and equipment import issues; a skills drain and overhanging debts as a result of Covid; tensions between festivals over exclusivity deals with artists; stressed-out organisers; and rising costs for everything from energy to artists’ fees and security.
“Costs have gone through the roof in everything apart from marketing,” says AIF chief executive John Rostron, from a Herefordshire field where he is setting up a small family festival.
Some have argued that natural selection is at work here: the explosion of boutique festivals has broadened choice, but has also spread talent – and fans’ cash – more thinly.
The 12-year-old Witcombe festival in Gloucester, due to host Example and Professor Green this weekend, was cancelled two weeks ago. Organisers blamed the “ongoing cost of living crisis” hitting ticket sales.
Cosmic Roots in Basingstoke cited similar issues, and a rise in production costs, when it pulled the plug last week, while the well-established Secret Garden Party in Cambridgeshire is ending in its current form and symbolically burned down its main stage at the end of July. Founder Freddie Fellowes said: “It’s no longer sustainable for independents to run festivals. Creativity is being strangled by corporate greed.”
Rostron says: “The difficulty is that if you put your ticket price out early, you commit to a price and a budget when the supply chain is wildly out of control. That is a huge risk. Margins are incredibly tight.”
It’s not all gloom, however. The Green Man festival, held last week in south Wales, had sold out in just two hours, and the Lake District’s Kendal Calling has seen record ticket sales for its August 2025 edition. A general boom in summer events indicates that consumers are willing to spend money on memorable experiences.
For bigger festivals, long-running tensions over corporate sponsorship exploded this year. First, the Edinburgh international book festival ended its 20-year partnership with investment company Baillie Gifford over its links to Israel and fossil fuel companies. Then Barclays suspended sponsorship of all Live Nation festivals for 2024 – including Download, Latitude and the Isle of Wight – after protests from bands and fans over the bank’s work with defence companies supplying Israel.
“It’s up to events to know their crowd,” says Rostron. “Sponsorship is an integral part of the festival world: you’d have to massively increase ticket prices without it,” Underscoring this, Oxfordshire’s Wilderness took its first ever headline sponsor this year – carmaker Audi.
Live Nation faces global battles too: last week 10 more US states joined a lawsuit alleging that the concert giant, which owns Ticketmaster, monopolised markets across its industry. Meanwhile, rival Anschutz Entertainment Group, which runs the British Summer Time and All Points East gigs in London, is attempting to win market share.
Rostron says significant questions hang over his industry: “There may be changes – could the new government intervene to lower VAT in this space, will supply chains settle, and can the market recover a little more?”
