the soundwaves of tomorrow: is there a future for Australian music festivals?

Wednesday 24th April, 2024

Music festivals are an inherently important part of Australia’s creative industry, for attendees and artists alike. If you’re not planning your next summer festival visit, whether it’s Falls Festival or Field Day, or anticipating the next lineup drop for Splendour in the Grass - what’re you doing? From moshing against the barrier for your favourite artist to the D&M’s with friends sitting in the field listening to the music from afar, Aussies just seem to crave the euphoric feeling and incredible atmosphere of a cheeky festival. Or do they?

On the 14th of February, the devastating news broke that the regional touring festival Groovin The Moo was being cancelled due to poor ticket sales, just two weeks after the lineup was announced with the organisers releasing a statement,

“We are extremely disappointed to announce that the Groovin the Moo 2024 tour has been forced to cancel. Ticket sales have not been sufficient to deliver a regional festival of this kind.”

This is the first time that the festival hasn’t taken place since 2005, apart from 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19.

Meanwhile, at this same time Splendour in the Grass were gearing up to drop their lineup and had Aussie festival goers shivering with antici... pation. The soul-crushing cancellation of Groovin surely had to be the lowest point for the music festival industry this year.

Over its lifespan, Splendour has been the festival for some of the world’s biggest acts - we’ve seen huge international headline artists like Coldplay, Florence and the Machine, Lizzo, Tyler The Creator, Lorde and The Strokes grace the North Byron Parklands stage alongside some of our homegrown mega artists like Tame Impala and Flume. The 2024 lineup dropped on the 12th of March with Kylie Minogue headlining alongside artists like G Flip, Omar Apollo, Future, Arcade Fire and Girl in Red, sparking a mixed response from the public. As good as 2024’s lineup was, this just wasn’t what the public expected out of Splendour.

Almost predicted, the announcement came from the festival organisers,

“With a heavy heart, we’re announcing the cancellation of Splendour in the Grass 2024,”

“We know there were many fans excited for this year’s line-up and all the great artists planning to join us, but due to unexpected events we’ll be taking the year off.”

The unfortunate reality seems to be that as much as we love our own Aussie artists, our excitement for festivals typically comes from international artists making the trek here to play for us.

Splendour and Groovin’s 2024 death, although we hope to see them back in the next year, are just fresh headstones in a graveyard of music festivals we’ve seen disappear over the last 10 years. We’ve seen THIS THAT cancel for two years in a row due to “challenging economic conditions”, FOMO Festival go into liquidation in 2020, Mountain Sounds cancelled a week out in 2019 due to strict policing legislations placed on the event by the NSW Government, and Stereosonic Festival take a hiatus in 2016 never to return.

Big Day Out, one of the biggest music festivals Australia’s ever seen who had previously hosted the likes of Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica and Kings of Leon disappeared in 2014 over poor ticket sales due to the headline act Blur dropping out two months prior to the first show. Talk about some real FOMO.

As festivals seem to be barely keeping their head above water, we’re seeing record numbers for individual artist tours. Taylor Swift’s recent Eras tour had 96,000 fans pack the MCG three nights in a row, P!nk’s Summer Carnival tour consisted of 20 stadium shows across Australia and New Zealand - both feats never accomplished by any other artist. With stats like these, there’s no reason we can’t do better for our music festivals - the answer is yes, there could be a future for Australian music festivals.

At the end of the day, we need to do more. We all love a concert, but it’s at festivals we escape from routine and discover our new favourite artists, meet new friends, experience a different sense of community, give light to new and upcoming acts, and feel a greater sense of freedom to express ourselves. Why pay $400 to see a single artist when you can pay less than half of that to see a lineup of twenty or so acts in a single day? Pour some of that hard earned money into our homegrown music scene instead, our artists deserve it.

Time to await that next festival lineup. I’ll see you for a D&M after that one artist on the grass in a few months.