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7NEWS
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- 7NEWS
Millions in government funding couldn't save Australia's biggest music festivals
National touring festival Listen Out is the latest of Australia's major music festivals to either hit pause or fold, despite receiving millions in government grants designed to keep them afloat. It's no secret production costs are higher than ever, artist fees are skyrocketing, and the cost-of-living crisis has led to more conservative spending by music fans. But the cancellations of events such as Splendour in the Grass, Falls Festival and Groovin' The Moo point to a brutal truth: government money hasn't been enough to overcome rising costs, artist fees, insurance challenges and shifting consumer behaviours. Perhaps the biggest funding injection came via the federal government's Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund, a $200 million program launched in 2020 as part of the COVID-19 Creative Economy Support Package. Crucially, six Australian festivals to either pause or fold post-pandemic received a combined $19.33 million in government funding. Splendour in the Grass: $16 million in government funding Splendour in the Grass was by far the most heavily supported, receiving: $1.1 million in RISE funding for its 2021 edition $5.8 million in RISE grants to its co-organisers Secret Sounds and Live Nation Australia Festivals More than $10 million in grants from the NSW Government through Create NSW's COVID support and relaunch schemes As previously reported by the 2024 and 2025 editions were cancelled, with organisers citing financial strain and soaring operational costs. Critics, however, pointed to waning audience interest and line-up dissatisfaction as contributing factors. Falls Festival: $1.5 million in government funding The long-running Falls Festival secured $1.5 million in RISE funding in 2021 to help reshape the event. But after back-to-back cancellations, it remains shelved. Promoters cited financial and operational challenges that rendered the festival unsustainable in its current form. Groovin The Moo: $1.2 million in government funding Regional touring festival Groovin The Moo received $1.2 million in federal funding to relaunch, but was cancelled for the second year in a row in 2025 — a sobering sign of the struggles facing regional live music. Listen Out: $500,000 in government funding Dance and hip-hop festival Listen Out was granted up to $500,000 from the NSW Government's Contemporary Music Festival Viability Fund. But just this week, organisers announced it wouldn't return in its traditional format. Instead, it will re-emerge as Listen Out Presents, a series of curated shows. Wide Open Space: $100,000 in government funding Northern Territory's Wide Open Space Festival, which received support from a territorial grant and the federal Live Music Australia program in 2023, cancelled its 2025 return. Organisers blamed rising costs and inadequate funding despite government backing. Caloundra Music Festival: $30,000 in government funding The Sunshine Coast Council pulled the plug on the Caloundra Music Festival in 2024, despite it receiving $30,000 from Events Queensland the year prior. Organisers pointed to mounting costs, declining ticket sales and ongoing uncertainty across the sector. While there's no silver bullet, one major festival has managed to buck the trend. In an interview with music industry blog The Black Hoody, Laneway Festival promoter Danny Rogers said the festival thrived by focusing less on big-name headliners and more on fostering culture. 'Laneway was always primarily focused on trying to create a cultural event that prioritised future icons vs. artists that were already massive headliners,' Rogers said. 'A lot of people think you can build festival lineups on radio play and data,' he added. 'But that doesn't create a culture — it feels homogeneous and pretty samey. We have passed on so many acts over the years which would have sold us more tickets but they didn't fit what we were trying to say as a festival.' Government support or not, one thing remains clear: culture thrives when its most engaged contributors are genuinely nurtured. Festivals that fail to connect authentically with audiences who understand the event's ethos are unlikely to survive.
ABC News
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
M A R N i E
Mulubinba/Newcastle's M A R N i E throws down a set full of dubstep and bass heaters! Loading Buckle up 'cos we're going in hard with this Unearthed artist's debut triple j mix.A rising star in the bass scene, M A R N i E has been making waves with her genre-melding sets and has taken to the stage at festivals including Groovin The Moo, Party In The Paddock and Rabbit Eat Lettuce in recent stranger to rubbing Her productions have caught the ears of heavyweights like Sippy, Slumberjack and our Mix Up Resident Moss, and earlier in the year she dropped her collab 'In My Eyes' with Just A Gent featuring RUZE. Check it here:You'll hear a whole lot more of M A R N i E's original productions in her Mix Up set tonight including a few unreleased tunes, plus plenty of 140 weapons and brain melting bangers. Turn it up!
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Climate
- The Guardian
Climate crisis could kill off Australian music festivals, report warns
Music festivals are a threatened species that could die out if they fail to adapt to the climate crisis. While soaring insurance and production costs, disruptions to supply chains, mass cancellations and shifts in consumer buying habits have all contributed to a flailing live music scene, extreme and unpredictable weather is an underlying contributor to these factors, an RMIT University report has found. Rain, Heat, Repeat: How Music Fans are Experiencing Extreme Weather will be released on Wednesday, with polling done by Green Music Australia and analysis done by RMIT and La Trobe University academics. Catherine Strong, a sociologist and associate professor at RMIT, said climate change was no longer a distant threat to the live music sector; the phenomenon was already drastically reshaping audience behaviours and the live music economy. In a single week last month 26 live music events were cancelled as the north-east seaboard of Australia prepared for Cyclone Alfred. Some 1,155 people who attended live music events and music festivals in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania, aged between 18 and 60, were interviewed in the research. Almost one-third of interviewees said they now consulted weather forecasts before making a commitment to buy tickets to a live music event. More than one-third (34%) said extreme weather had made them more cautious about buying tickets, rising to 44% for those who described themselves as regular live music gig goers. One in three said they would avoid attending a music festival if the temperature was forecast to hit 35C, and almost one in five said they were now purchasing ticket insurance to cover events affected by extreme weather. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Strong said the findings provided insight into why consumer behaviour has changed significantly in recent years, with concert goers delaying their purchasing longer, in turn causing some of Australia's major music festivals to cancel due to insufficient early ticket sales. In 2024 both Splendour in the Grass and Groovin The Moo cancelled, citing insufficient early ticket sales. 'The normal way the festival industry does business relies on a certain number of tickets to be sold early and often,' Strong said. 'People are now getting cautious enough about the weather that they're starting to leave their ticket buying to the point where they can meaningfully look at a weather forecast, and this in turn affects how festivals can assess whether or not they are viable … and for a lot of them, that's just not practical. A late cancellation means having to pay artists more for their cancellation fees, and it drives insurance costs up even more.' The report found that 85% of festival goers had been affected by either floods, storms, heatwaves or the threat of bushfires at an event they had attended in the past 12 months. The report warned this appeared to be pushing consumers into 'safer' options, such as buying tickets only for large concerts in covered arenas and stadiums, venues where international artists such as Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga have the capacity to fill within hours of tickets going on sale, a capacity few locally grown acts possess. 'The sustainability of Australian musicians being able to make a career out of what they do is definitely being threatened by these trends,' Strong said. 'One of the things festivals have done is provide a space where up and coming local acts reach audiences that they wouldn't have done otherwise. [Festivals] have been one of the stepping stones that artists have been able to take in order to build their careers.' Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion The bass player with the indie rock band Spacey Jane, Peppa Lane, has experienced the effects of extreme weather on the live music scene at a professional and personal level. At the 2023 Rolling Sets music festival on the NSW Central Coast, Spacey Jane's gig was pulled due to an electrical storm. 'All through through the day, sets were being cancelled, and then the weather cleared and the festival would start up again. It was on and off throughout the day … we ended up only playing three of our songs in what was supposed to be an hour-long set. The previous year she had attended what she refers to as 'Splendour in the Mud', the 2022 Splendour in the Grass festival in northern NSW that left tens of thousands of festival goers bogged, stranded and out of pocket after torrential rain. 'We were up to our knees in mud,' she said. 'There's a level where it's fun, but if you're camping and your tent is getting swept away, everything you have is completely drenched and you can't get dry for three days, then it's not really fun any more.' Adaptations the music festival sector needed to urgently adopt included the creation of permanent weather resilient festival sites with heat shelters, flood-resistant staging and accessible water refilling stations, the report concluded. Better communications over weather safety plans and cancellation policies were also needed, but none of these adaptations would be achieved without greater federal and state government cooperation, the report said.
