NPR Podcast Asks: Are Music Festivals Dead?

[ivn]

Christopher Polk via Getty Images

Greg Rosalsky and Wailin Wong, hosts of NPR Podcast ‘The Indicator from Planet Money’ pose an interesting question, is 2024 the year music festivals died?

Sierra Nevada World Music Festival in northern California, KickOff Jam, a country music festival in Florida, Blue Ridge Rock Festival in Virginia-the list of recent cancellations just goes on and on. Even big-name festivals that used to sell out in minutes struggled to sell tickets this year. Burning Man failed to sell out for the first time in over a decade. Coachella, the most-attended annual music festival in North America, saw a decline of around 15% in ticket sales.

And it's not just America. By one count, over 60 music festivals were canceled in the U.K. this year alone. In Australia, so many festivals were canceled that one newspaper there recently asked, are the nation's music festivals extinct? What's behind it and is it temporary or a permanent cultural shift? Rosalsky, Wong, guest musician Phil Pirrone, and former chief economist of Spotify Will Page discuss.


Some excerpts:

WONG: Obviously, the pandemic was hard on festivals. That said, in 2022, consumers were flush with cash, and pent-up demand for social activities helped many festivals, including Desert Daze, come roaring back. Attendance was maybe better than ever.

ROSALSKY: But then, in 2023, there began to be the rumblings of trouble.

PIRRONE: I think it's because everything costs more, you know? And as a touring artist, I understand this firsthand. It's very hard to make ends meet on the road, you know? The band's gas bill is double. Their hotel bill is double. Their personnel bill is double, you know?

---------------
PIRRONE: To be completely honest, a lot of festivals are struggling to move tickets, and we experienced that right out the gate. We're like, oh, OK. Huh. What are we going to do? It just didn't look like enough sales were going to be there, so we made the hard decision to cancel.

ROSALSKY: Inflation hasn't just made it harder to book artists and put on a music festival due to cost-of-living increases and higher interest rates. Many of the usual festivalgoers seem to be tightening their belts. We're seeing similar downturns in other leisure and travel sectors, but music festivals, especially smaller independent ones, seem to be getting hit harder.

---------------
ROSALSKY: Anyways, historically, radio stations, MTV and, you know, music magazines and blogs may have exposed music listeners to a wider, more diverse range of new music. The algorithms of Spotify and Apple Music, though, Will argues-that could be changing that.

PAGE: So if I look at a multi-genre festival poster and I see all these different bands of all these different styles, my gut reaction is, that's a playlist that's been created for somebody else. Therefore, I choose not to go.

ROSALSKY: But perhaps the most compelling argument that Will makes for the festival downturn is this-Gen Z may have less enthusiasm for festivals than generations past.

---------------
WONG: Yeah, during the festival boom last decade, a leading explanation was that millennials preferred spending on experiences rather than things. They liked going places. They liked socializing. They liked drinking booze and doing drugs. They liked hooking up. Who among us?

ROSALSKY: Anyway, research suggests that, actually, though, Gen Z may be different. It finds that they drink less alcohol. Overall they do fewer drugs. They have less sex and fewer partners, and they're lonelier. Will believes this generational change is reducing demand for music festivals. And he points out it's not just smartphones and social media.

PAGE: I do think there's something to this particular cohort where the wounds have yet-of the lockdown, the pandemic, have yet to heal.

---------------
WONG: Oh, that is brutal. Meanwhile, many older millennials-that's me-we're not going to festivals like we used to. We've got little kids and work obligations. We're just tired. My knees hurt all the time-I can't be standing up. All of these changes are forcing festival promoters like Phil Pirrone to go back to the drawing board.

PIRRONE: You know, I think the market has changed. I think the festival landscape and also the economy, the culture-all festivals-this goes for all festivals-need to open our doors to the next generation. And we probably need to pay attention to what, you know, would appeal to them.

Source

Saw a bunch of shows this year and one did get cancelled only a few hours before the event-Lovers & Friends Festival. I had already flown in and made arrangements so it was quite the inconvenience. Producers reasoned strong winds, but it honestly wasn’t that bad. ONTD, has a music festival you were attending gotten cancelled? Are music festivals dying? Are we really too old for this shit?