Festivals are dying, but there is light at the end of the tunnel – Editorial

Festival cancellations are rife right now, but organisers believe it is temporary. Photo / NZME

Editorial

THE FACTS

• Smaller summer festivals have been cancelled due to the economy, but organisers hope for a return.
• Bay Dreams and Longline Classic organisers expressed intentions to resume events when conditions improve.
• Major festivals like Electric Avenue and Rhythm and Vines continue to draw large crowds, despite challenges.

Partygoers, there is no need to panic. Smaller summer festivals have been dying recently, but organisers have good reason to believe they will return in one form or another.

Reports of cancelled festivals abound across the country, due to the state of the economy and other factors.

Cancellations over the last year include Bay Dreams, Juicy Fest, Timeless Summer Tour, the Paradise City Rock Festival, the Revival Festival and, most recently, the organisers of the Longline Classic spoke with the Gisborne Herald about why this year’s event is the last.

Despite this, some organisers seem to expect, or perhaps hope, for a recovery in the not-too-distant future.

Bay Dreams organisers Mitch Lowe and Toby Burrows called their 2025 cancellation a “hiatus”, while Longline Classic organisers Kurt Barker and James Bristow said they “would love to run more events in Gisborne in future when the economy picks up”.

They may not just be empty words.

Summer music festivals are a time-honoured Kiwi tradition, not exclusive to the big cities.

One only needs to look back at Nambassa and Sweetwaters in the seventies and eighties, or more recently at the Big Day Out throughout the nineties and noughties.

The Nambassa Festival was capable of drawing a crowd of more than 60,000 to a Waihī farm, while Sweetwaters got between 15,000 to 40,000 attendees for the years it ran at Ngāruawāhia.

Festivals have shown longevity through economic headwinds, even if they are no longer the same festivals. Today, many continue, without signs of slowing down in a tough economic climate.

Electric Avenue marked its 10th anniversary this year with about 75,000 attendees over two days, cementing itself as one of Australasia’s biggest music festivals.

Within the broader context of rising costs, struggles to attract international headline talent and declining ticket sales reported by the organisers of these smaller events, this is an impressive display of the fundamental resilience this kind of event has.

This is not exclusive to events in the larger cities. Not even wet, boggy conditions could deter bumper crowd sizes of 28,000 for Rhythm and Vines in Gisborne and 10,000 for its sister festival Rhythm and Alps in Wānaka over the 2024-2025 New Year period.

Crowds have shown time and again they will turn up, rain or shine, cost-of-living crisis or not.

We can believe organisers when they tell us they intend to return with time, but they will need the renewed support of the festival-going public when that happens.

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