‘We eat and drink risk’: rising costs bring curtains down on more music festivals in the UK | Music industry

Hosting Scotland’s first Womad Festival seemed like an easy sell for Glasgow, the country’s concert capital and a self-proclaimed “global hub for music lovers”.

However, last week, the world-famous event celebrating performers from around the world, which has been successfully staged in 30 countries since it was co-founded by former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel in 1982, was canceled due to declining ticket sales.

It’s the 20th casualty so far this year, as small and independent festival operators enter another tough summer facing myriad challenges, from die-hard consumers becoming more selective about how they spend their money, to rising energy and labor costs, and competition from industry heavyweights.

“Independent festival organizers basically eat and drink risk,” says John Collins, chief executive of Live, the body representing the UK live music industry.

“A year ago, they have to commit a huge amount of cost to booking all the tickets, and then they have to believe they will sell enough tickets to deliver them and hopefully make a small profit at the end of it. It’s hard, there are much easier ways to make money, but they love it.”

The long-running Secret Garden Party, which has featured acts from Ed Sheeran to Clean Bandit and attracted Prince Harry as a party-goer in 2014, has closed at the end of its 2024 edition with the symbolic burning of the main stage as its founder said it was “no longer possible for independents to run festivals”.

This year, the dream of the team at Chai Wallahs, the touring festival’s collective venue, of holding their own event at the same location in Cambridgeshire this year also ended in ashes.

By last April, they had smashed their crowdfunding goal, raising £180,000 to launch a new not-for-profit grassroots festival, Where It All Began, aimed at tackling the “corporatisation” of the industry.

But by the end of that month, two of its members took to Instagram to explain why it had been postponed until next year. Problems included weak ticket sales, which they said was “felt across the entire sector,” and a 10% to 15% increase in infrastructure and transportation costs since the start of the Iranian conflict.

The couple said: “If we had gone ahead we would have faced a potential loss of between £60,000 and £80,000.” “The place where it all began would have died before it began.”

Days earlier, the “Duke of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Henry Fitzroy, had shut down the Nashville-inspired Red Rooster festival, scheduled for the end of May, which he had held on the family’s sprawling Suffolk estate for more than a decade. The event was liquidated due to high costs and low ticket sales, with no possibility of a refund.

However, despite the high number of festival casualties, the measure of closures this year is the best, or rather the worst, since before the pandemic.

There were 43 cancellations or postponements last year; In 2024 that number was 78, and in 2023 the number was 36, according to the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF).

More than 250 festivals have closed since before the pandemic, and annual running numbers now stand at about 600.

“This year is the lowest number since I took office, and some of them are not gone for good, they are just taking a year off,” says John Rostron, chief executive of the AIF. “There will always be some downfall because they didn’t do it right, or there simply isn’t demand for them.

“The only thing that’s true is that margins have become incredibly tight because of rising costs. Festivals used to have the ability to afford the cost fluctuations between the 11-month commitment and what happens up to the day of the festival, but now they can’t afford it like they used to.

“Look at the fees charged to artists, as an example: they have gone up 60% to 70% over the last five or six years, especially for A-list talent. This may not be an issue for major labels, but it is for freelancers.”

There is also an ongoing debate about the influence of corporate giants such as US giant AEG and Live Nation, which also owns Ticketmaster.

The Wireless Festival, which is owned by Live Nation, made headlines after organizers were forced to cancel following a backlash over the selection of Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, as the headliner of the three-day festival in London in July. As the uproar worsened, the Ministry of Interior moved to ban the artist’s travel visa.

Organizers of Womad Glasgow said its failure “reflects the challenge of launching a new large-scale event in a competitive and crowded market”, but that saturation has not stopped deep-pocketed Live Nation from running two new major festivals at the end of this month.

State Fayre promises to bring “a true taste of Americana” to the former V Festival site at Hylands Park in Essex, with headliners including Kings of Leon and Alanis Morissette, while the Blenheim Palace Festival is a five-day event featuring acts including Michael Bublé, Katy Perry and Teddy Swims.

Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have been investigating Live Nation’s market dominance. The company’s UK trading activities were highlighted last year when the competition watchdog launched an investigation into the way tickets for the Oasis reunion tour were priced via Ticketmaster.

Last month, MPs’ select business and trade committee published a report calling on competition watchdog, the Capital Markets Authority, to investigate Live Nation’s dominance and influence on the live music sector, while also noting that there appeared to be a “climate of fear” among witnesses who provided evidence to its investigations.

A Live Nation spokesperson said: “The pressures facing festivals are being felt across the sector, with costs rising significantly for events of all sizes.

“The UK festival sector remains diverse and highly competitive, with major operators, regional promoters, specialist festival companies and hundreds of independent events playing an important role.”

AIF’s Rostron is cautiously optimistic. “We’re halfway out of the worst of it,” he says. “But without further interventions, there is a dark cloud hovering. We need to enable independents to thrive and survive; there is potential for a great deal of growth in the festival sector overall.”

Next month, the Kilburn Garden Party, which will be held in the grounds of Kilburn Castle outside Glasgow, is set to welcome around 7,000 revelers for its 16th edition.

The downsizing of festivals after mass proliferation in the 2000s has led to the shedding of many festivals that failed to develop a long-term sustainable strategy, says Chris Knight, co-founder and chief curator of the multi-day festival.

“This is our best year ever, and we’re about to sell out weeks and weeks earlier than last year, and we’re going higher,” he says. “There are the same pressures of fewer ticket buyers, higher costs, and tougher conditions. Now the industry is shrinking, and those that have survived are leaner and tougher, and they know what they are doing.

“The independent festivals that have survived have a stronger focus on communities, not huge stages and headliners. We’re focused on going deep locally. We’ve had to raise ticket prices by 10%. That’s above inflation, but we deliver such a good event that people are happy to pay for it.”