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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Entertainment
Ben Eltham

Will Australia’s festivals survive a wet, chaotic, expensive summer?

Two festivalgoers at Splendour in the Grass 2022. The first day of performances was cancelled due to heavy rain at the site.
Mud-splattered festivalgoers at Splendour in the Grass 2022 in July. The first day of performances was cancelled due to heavy rain at the Byron Bay site. Photograph: Matt Jelonek/Getty Images

When the Bendigo region was drenched by hundreds of millimteres of rain in mid-October that caused widespread flooding, the organisers of Almost Summer festival pulled the plug. It was decided it was too risky to continue with the event, which was scheduled for the end of November.

Almost Summer joins a string of festivals and live events on Australia’s east coast that have been forced to cancel or scale back due to bad weather, rising touring costs and Covid-19, including Strawberry Fields, This That, the Grass is Greener and Flow. In addition, the Falls festival has announced it is moving its Victorian event to Melbourne due to local opposition over its planned move to Birregurra. And there remain open questions about Splendour in the Grass 2023, after the mudfest on its Byron site earlier this year.

The choppy conditions confront an industry that is still clawing its way back from the pandemic shutdowns, which mark the deepest downturn in Australia’s arts sector since the second world war. Audiences are still well below 2019 levels, especially in Victoria. Industry body Apra-Amcos says its latest data shows that live music activity is operating at “approximately 50% of the pre-Covid period”.

The industry is getting “smashed from all sides”, says Australian Festivals Association managing director Mitch Wilson. “I’m actually quite worried – audience numbers are down.”

Some AFA members are losing money on their first events staged after two years of lockdowns. “Without some clarity on the future environment, they’re even questioning what the future is,” Wilson says, citing rising costs, soft ticket sales, extreme weather and skills shortages as significant headwinds for festivals and presenters.

Festivalgoers brave rain and the mud at Splendour in the Grass 2022.
Festivalgoers brave rain and mud at Splendour in the Grass 2022. Photograph: Marc Grimwade/WireImage

In particular, there is currently a widespread labour shortage as many production staff left the industry during the pandemic, having been unable to work for two and a half years, often without jobkeeper or wage support.

“It’s hard to coax them back given the pandemic exposed how insecure their work is, and government didn’t support our creative workers,” Wilson says.

A lot of people let their security licences lapse during the pandemic, says Adelle Robinson of event company Fuzzy, which means the pool of available security workers is “significantly diminished”. Many who spoke for this piece said it was the same for stage crew, ticketing personnel, marketing freight and transport workers too.

“It seems that it’s almost impossible to get a truck driver at the moment,” Robinson says. “Across the board [costs] are 20-30% up on every line item in the budget, which is making things super difficult.”

Wilson doesn’t think the touring model is completely broken – yet. “People are muddling through,” he says. However, Wilson suggests there might be significant disruption ahead. “I think we’re going to see significant consolidation, or realignment, of promoters and festival organisers that put on events.”

Labour shortages, travel, fuel and freight costs have become a major problem for organisers. “One tour producer that we’re speaking to has estimated that their freight costs have blown out by $70,000 compared to their last quotes,” says Katherine Connor, executive director of Performing Arts Connections Australia. She says others are reporting their costs have shot up 30%, which is squeezing producers and venues facing patchy ticket sales and hesitant audiences. “It costs more to present a show, but ticket prices aren’t going up because audiences just can’t afford it because of cost of living,” Connor says.

In easier times … Falls Festival in Lorne, back in 2017.
In easier times … Falls festival in Lorne, back in 2017. Photograph: Zakarij Kaczmarek/WireImage

As a result, there has been a general retrenchment across the performing arts. Connor cited figures that 76% of venues are cutting back their budgets. This will inevitably hurt artists. “In our last mapping of programmers, 33% of venues will be spending less on programming,” says Connor. She wants to see more public investment and better coordination of cultural policy across local, state and federal levels, including a “matched programming fund” that would see federal funding matched to investment from local government venues and centres.

“We always knew 2022 was going to be a messy year,” says Live Performance Australia’s executive director, Evelyn Richardson. “We know the ticket-buying patterns have changed coming out of Covid. People are reluctant, there’s some hesitancy. It’s much harder for producers and promoters: previous ticket sales models don’t apply and people are buying tickets later.”

“The data says tickets are late – nothing is selling out early,” Connor agrees. She believes consumer behaviour has changed to favour walk-up sales – not necessarily because of Covid-related hesitancy, but rather a more general shift in consumer sentiment. “Challenging work is getting harder to sell.”

Richardson agrees: “We’ve got inflation, we’ve got geopolitical instability, all of these factors impact consumer confidence and the capacity to buy. We know from previous downturns like the GFC that people still want to go out and be entertained, but they are more discerning about which shows they go to and how many.”

It’s not bad across the board, says Robinson: some shows are selling well while others struggle. It is just difficult to predict which will be which. “We just did the Listen Out tour, which was our first touring festival post-Covid in its normal format. Across Australia and Auckland, we got 160,000 people. Auckland and Perth were stronger than pre-Covid, but Melbourne was down.”

Pointing to a sold-out bill at the 6,000-capacity festival Harbourlife, Robinson believes “boutique events are doing better”.

“We’re also doing the Rüfüs Du Sol tour, and that has totally exceeded expectations in terms of sales. But I know there’s lots of shows that aren’t doing so well,” she adds. “The main thing is it’s really hard to know what’s going to work and not going to work, in terms of audience confidence.”

The federal government announced $22m in funds for live performance in the October budget, which has been welcomed by a sector with a make-or-break summer ahead. Even so, Robinson argues it’s not all doom and gloom. “People are buying tickets, it’s on its way back – but the correction is taking longer than people expected it to,” she says.

Much will be determined by the weather – and in that respect there might be a glimmer of sunshine in the offing, with the Bureau of Meteorology forecasting the end of the La Niña by February.

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