Australia’s Music Festivals Are Dying! ..and It’s Not Because People Stopped Dancing

Once upon a time, music festivals were the beating heart of an Australian summer. You’d scrape together your last $280, brave the dust or mud or both, and get spiritually reborn somewhere between a D-floor mosh pit and a $14 souvlaki stand. They were sweaty, euphoric, chaotic – and they were ours.

Now? The stages are silent. The porta-loos are packed away. And the only thing hitting higher notes than a festival DJ are the insurance premiums.

Splendour in the Grass? Scrapped in 2024. Groovin the Moo? Gone. Falls Festival? Fell, ironically. Bluesfest? Pulling the plug in 2025 after 35 years (ABC News). Even Good Life, the country’s biggest under-18s music festival, just went on “indefinite hiatus,” which is PR speak for “we can’t afford it and we’re crying in a beanbag”.

So, what the hell happened?

Let’s start with the obvious: putting on a music festival in Australia is now roughly as risky as launching a rocket with a chewing gum budget. According to SoundCheck, a report by Creative Australia, the average cost to run a music festival is $3.9 million. The profit, if you’re lucky? A tiny sliver: around $731k. One in three festivals still operate at a loss. I’m no economist, but that feels like trying to sell Tim Tams in Antarctica.

The cost of insurance alone has exploded. By “exploded,” I mean gone from “oh yeah that’s doable” to “are you actually kidding me?” Some organizers have reported public liability premiums rising from $5,000 to $250,000. That’s a 4,900% increase. That’s not inflation. That’s extortion with a glitter cannon (Michael West Media).

Then there’s our favourite uniquely-Australian invention: the “user-pays” policing model. Sounds innocent, right? Like something involving a public toilet. Nope. This is a system where festivals are forced to pay the government tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars just to have police show up. Sometimes these fees are dropped on organisers days before the event, with zero explanation, zero negotiation, and zero chill (ABC Hack). Imagine getting ghosted by your own budget.

Meanwhile, Live Nation and Ticketmaster, two companies who have slowly fused into one giant corporate megazord, control the venues, ticketing, artist bookings, merch, and maybe the actual fabric of time. They’ve been accused of dynamic pricing (a fun little game where your ticket price jumps from $180 to $390 while you’re still putting in your card details), and tacking on fees so confusing that you’d swear someone made them up with a dartboard and a whiteboard marker.

Let’s not forget: fans aren’t the villains here. We still want live music. We just can’t afford it. A 2024 report from The Australia Institute found that 52% of young Australians have cut back on live music spending because they’re too busy paying for “life.” You know, boring stuff like food and shelter. Rent is up, groceries are a joke, and now we’re being asked to drop $320 on a one-day ticket to a half-full field with no lineup? Come on.

And even when we do want to buy, we’re scared. Thanks to the endless cycle of last-minute cancellations, fans are now waiting till the final days to commit. But festivals need 71% of tickets sold before show day just to break even. So promoters panic, pull the plug early, and the cycle continues. It’s like musical chairs but with more anxiety and fewer chairs.

Sure, there’s a federal report with the bang-on title “Am I Ever Going to See You Live Again?” It includes some decent suggestions: ban extreme ticket pricing, fund youth ticket vouchers, make promoters include local artists in tours (Parliamentary Inquiry). But so far, it’s just that: a report. No legislation. No guarantees. Just more hopeful PDFs collecting digital dust.

There are some survivors in the wreckage. Good Things Festival, Unify Gathering, and a few DIY grassroots events are managing to keep their heads above water by catering to loyal subcultures and trimming the fat (both figuratively and in catering budgets). But these are the exceptions, not the blueprint.

And it’s not just the festivals themselves copping it. When a major event folds, it sends shockwaves through the entire ecosystem and I’m not just talking about the guy who sells bucket hats. I mean the local businesses who’ve built entire operations around supplying gear, sound, staging, lighting, and entertainment. Companies like New Trend Party Hire, who kit out everything from backyard birthdays to large-scale outdoor events, or Spinning Disc Entertainment, a Melbourne based DJ and event hire crew that helps bring the actual vibe — all of them get hit when festivals go dark. It’s not just lost income; it’s lost momentum, lost bookings, and lost confidence across the board.

These are the businesses that keep the party going, rain or shine, lineup or no lineup. But when organisers are forced to cancel due to last-minute policing invoices or insurance quotes that look more like luxury home loans, it’s these suppliers who end up paying for it in silence.

Here’s the real problem: festivals in Australia aren’t collapsing because we stopped loving live music. They’re collapsing because the business model has collapsed. It’s too expensive to run, too risky to insure, too rigged against independents, and too stacked in favour of corporate giants who seem more focused on profit margins than actual punters.

And when we lose festivals, we lose more than just gigs. We lose a cultural ritual, a sense of community, a shared moment in the middle of nowhere, screaming lyrics under the stars with your best mates and some guy named Dan you just met in the mosh.

If we don’t act, if governments don’t regulate monopolies, support small festivals, and cut the red tape strangling the scene, we’re not just going to lose more events. We’re going to lose the soundtrack to our summers. And to be honest, we’ll deserve the silence.