Published
Thu, May 19, 2022, 11:40
- Despite promising signs for the global events industry, festivals are still facing an uphill battle to sell tickets.
By some metrics, the event economy is booming at levels not seen since before the pandemic. So why are some festivals struggling?
Earlier this month, UK festival Brainchild cancelled its 2022 edition. This sent a small seismic shock through the independent festival community. Wasn't 2022 supposed to be the year we finally put Covid-19 restrictions and cancellations in the rearview mirror?
According to International Music Summit's latest business report, festival tickets are currently selling at 176 percent of 2019 levels. But this doesn't reflect many promoters' experiences around the world. Marina Blake, part of the team behind Brainchild, thinks the festival ecosystem has changed due to numerous issues, some temporary—supply chain problems, people prioritising going abroad—and some more long-term, such as the rising cost of fuel and artist fees, and the impact this has on ticket prices, all while people are enduring a cost-of-living crisis.
"After the initial post-lockdown boom, I think a lot of promoters went big for 2022—loads more events have been launched, and the limited demand is heavily split," she told Resident Advisor.
Blake is describing a perfect storm: decaying infrastructure, a global supply chain crisis, increasing inflation and a saturation of events. (According to data from RA, there are 66 percent more electronic music festivals in 2022 than 2019.) While some of these issues are temporary, something larger may be afoot.
As such, cancellations like Brainchild aren't anomalies. Back in February, French festival Monticule was forced to pull the plug after filing for bankruptcy. Pieter Jansen, half of the team behind long-running Amsterdam party Breakfast Club, told RA that he and his partner decided to put on a weekend festival for the first time after more than a decade of running events. After an initial flurry, ticket sales plummeted.
"[Our] expectations weren't met, actually they weren't accurate at all," he said. "People have become way more cautious before actually making the decision of buying tickets, even though we've been around for 12 years. At this point it's hard to trust your 'intuition' when it comes to taking decisions and making a programme. It may even feel close to impossible to plan out our party without running an enormous risk."
Jansen has also seen additional logistical issues arise in terms of staffing. "Loads of people [...] have left the industry," he said. "Meaning [that] valuable knowledge is lost while it's hard to find experienced people in the broadest sense, from marketing to bar and security personnel."
Because of these problems, Jansen and his team recently took the difficult decision to reimagine their debut festival as a series of parties across Amsterdam.
In some parts of the world, the problem is more familiar: Covid-19 restrictions. Taiwan's Organik Festival is hoping to go ahead in 2022, once things open up again. Popular local DJ Diskonnected, who helps organise the festival, believes it's too early to talk about a "post-Covid world."
In Taiwan, he added, the "music scene has undergone some fundamental changes, with uncertainty (in bookings and if bookings can work) as one of the core issues. Furthermore, there are quite a number of DJs and producers who chose different career paths."
It's ultimately this uncertainty that's affecting the public's ticket-buying habits. RA's own data shows that so far in 2022, 46 percent of people bought tickets within 30 days of the festival, up from 36 percent between 2017 and 2019.
Charlie Swinburn, part of the crew behind boutique UK festival Dusty Flyers' Club, said this late surge of sales makes it "very difficult [for] promoters to predict demand and budget accordingly." This has made an already precarious industry—which requires promoters to shoulder upfront costs—even more precarious.
And it's not just festivals—club nights are also struggling. Blake said promoter friends in the industry are constantly reporting poor sales and some empty dance floors. "Every promoter I know is stressed and working extremely hard for their sales," she said.
Still, there are some silver linings, such as focusing on smaller, local artists or taking steps to reconceptualise the relationship between promoter and punter. Earlier this month, Dusty Flyers' Club wrote an unusually candid post on Instagram, explaining that if they didn't sell enough tickets in the coming weeks it could lead to "drastic actions."
Speaking to RA, Swinburn added: "As a small, independent festival without funding and therefore being wholly reliant on ticket sales, we simply can't afford for people to buy tickets at the last minute as we have financial commitments to suppliers, so I guess it was really just reminding people of that and asking for a bit of help."
This kind of direct interaction may reflect changes to the way independent promoters market themselves in the future. For Nathalia, part of the team behind ambient and well-being festival Experiment Intrinsic, this means "informing our audience more on their role in participating at our events, being more transparent about the demands of running this project (especially through a pandemic), as well as launching new community incentives to ensure we can build our audience base, which has become more difficult in recent years for small independent projects which rely on specific numbers to break even."
Honest, open dialogue feels like a far cry from the typical promoter-punter relationship, which relies on the former pushing a pristine, exaggerated version of their event or festival, often via over-produced Instagram videos.
"This is a moment to try to cooperate as much as possible to be able to endure and survive," said Jansen. "It's an issue that should be addressed—more transparency is definitely needed."
Last year, Brainchild trialled a new approach with transparency and community at its core. The festival launched a "crowd cover" policy, where ticket holders committed to donating half of their ticket price if the festival was cancelled due to Covid-19 restrictions (a DIY version of Covid-19 insurance before it existed). Though the experiment was a success, Blake remains skeptical about the sustainability of these utopian, community-led efforts.
"Maybe very small and volunteer-led things can survive due to their reduced overall costs/risks, but it will take a lot of determination and bearing of hardship from them," she said.
Still, she remains hopeful. "I sincerely hope that this proves to be a time of regrouping and reimagining the way these events work so that they can adapt and continue using less risky, more community-powered models. That's what we'll be looking at."
Photo: Brainchild Festival