Written by Ben Barwick
10/04/2024
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Everything ever is over.
Sorry.
… I felt for a moment that I could end this article there and then. But like that busker from the Brisbane St mall in Launceston who kept getting booted out every day in 2010 for playing Pink Floyd deep cuts without a permit, I will persist.
As a country, we already lost a lot of festivals. Falls Festival, Big Day Out, Stereosonic and Soundwave all went the way of the GSM blips in our computer speakers, and we moved on to other festivals. But now they’re going too. Groovin’ The Moo, Splendour in the Grass, MONA FOMA, Sydney NYE, all cancelled. Party in the Paddock have today dedicated themselves to some dates for next year, and Good Things is expected to make an announcement about 2024 dates soon enough.
As Party In The Paddock has just said themselves, “it’s a tough time to be a music festival.” And why is that? Obviously COVID-19 never helped, but I believe there’s a much bigger disease at play, and that disease is money… yeah, that’s right, the economy. In a world where tasty cheese is at least $10/kg, people who are of festival-going age are struggling. If the price of cheese is going up, so is everything else: insurance, electricity, staff wage, venue fees, travel costs, equipment hire, cleaning... And because that cheeky lil’ number on the checkout screen keeps going up, the people providing services need more money, so they put their own cheeky lil’ numbers up. On and on it goes.
Add all those costs together, and you’re just about at the budget a festival would’ve been at about 10-15 years ago. Notice anything? No bands. Now add in enough bands to create hype and deem it as a festival. 30 bands, what are you paying them? Who are they? Do you want to draw people in with headliners from across the ocean? The Wombats will set you back at least $75,000. Slipknot costs over $300k. Lil Nas X, $1.5m. Don’t even ask about Taylor Swift, who was projected to make a net $440m for her Australian tour (Forbes, 2022).
Hmmm, why are all these festivals cancelling? Is it because they have to charge through the roof and are pricing out their clientele just to have a “wow” moment? So maybe we just… do less, right? Pandemonium Rocks festival is going ahead this year, but they’ve just slashed Placebo and Deep Purple from their lineup, alongside some other decent acts, likely because they just cannot afford them. It feels like quite a damaging thing to do, especially for an already fairly embattled festival (Nine, 2024). But what choice did they have?
So what’s to do? What happens now? What’s the solution?
Oh, I don’t know, if only there were 30 young bands hanging around in your local area who are willing to play muddy fields for the cost of a slab… oh wait. Hold up. Just a second. Woah there pal.
One thing I’ve noticed is this idea that playing a festival in your hometown is exclusive and a hard-to-come-by thing. PITP do it right, they get a shit-tonne of local acts to play alongside big names like Genesis Owusu, G-Flip and The Darkness, but what about the rest of these festivals? Why don’t we have more grassroots festivals in Australia, and why aren't these bigger festivals more dedicated to hosting more bands from the local area?
I don't know about you, but so many of the bands I listen to do this for the love of music. They want to be musicians even though they know how hard it's going to be to break through, yet Splendour and Groovin’ do the bare minimum in throwing bones to these acts that would likely be happy to play for a six-pack and an artist's pass. I sometimes feel like walking up to event organisers and saying “hey, here's 10 local acts that will fill the gaps in your schedule. No need to pay me, give them $100 per person.”
Does it not make sense to support the lands you work on? Does it not make sense to save the money you're spending on someone's reputation to instead increase the reputation of the people around you that work hard for basically nothing?
Or has the industry truly lost its heart, and only works to the beat of a dollar sign while treating fan service like a slot machine?
Hear me when I say:
I truly believe these festivals getting cancelled isn't a loss to our scene.
I truly believe the loss occurred when top-dollar became a motivation and the greed of success replaced the love of music.
I truly believe that local scenes need more major representations at these well-known events.
I truly believe music should be a lot less about money and a lot more about passion; in fact I don't know if money should be a factor at all.
Take a note from Party In The Paddock.
Local acts ARE your scene.
Treat them that way.
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