Festivals appear to be enormously profitable — large crowds, high ticket prices, expensive drinks. A substantial number lose money and a steady stream cancel or fold each year.
Having worked on the production side of a few, the arithmetic is less favourable than it looks.
Where the money goes
The cost structure surprises people.
Artist fees are the largest single item and have risen sharply, particularly for the small number of acts capable of headlining. Touring has become the primary income for most artists, and fees reflect that.
Infrastructure is the next largest and is almost entirely invisible to attendees. Staging, power generation, fencing, sanitation, water, roads, drainage, communications. All of it installed on a site that may be a field and removed afterwards.
Safety and staffing. Medical provision, security, stewarding, and the licensing requirements attached to all of it.
Insurance, which has become dramatically more expensive following widely publicised cancellations and which for some events is now a significant obstacle to running at all.
And the licensing process itself, which for a large event involves months of work with multiple authorities.
The revenue is more concentrated than it looks
Tickets are the obvious source and frequently do not cover the costs alone.
Bar and food revenue is substantial and is why concessions are priced as they are, and why bringing your own is restricted. That restriction is an economic necessity rather than an arbitrary rule, which does not make it popular.
Sponsorship, which for many events is the difference between viability and failure, and which shapes the branding attendees complain about.
And ancillary income — camping upgrades, parking, merchandise, hospitality tiers — which has grown as a share precisely because the core economics are so tight.
The weather problem
The risk that has no good mitigation.
An outdoor event's costs are almost entirely committed in advance. Revenue is not.
Poor weather reduces attendance for events selling on the day, reduces bar spend substantially, and can force cancellation with costs already incurred.
Cancellation insurance exists and has become expensive, with exclusions that have widened.
Which means a single bad year can end an event that had been viable for a decade, and this is the most common single cause of festivals disappearing.
The consolidation
A structural change with visible effects.
Ownership of festivals has concentrated substantially, with large entertainment companies acquiring independent events.
The advantages are real — buying power for artists, shared infrastructure, financial resilience.
The consequences include similar line-ups across events, since the same booking relationships apply, and pressure on independents who cannot compete for headliners.
Several long-running independent events have cited exactly this in explaining closures.
Why line-ups look alike
Following directly.
The pool of acts able to headline a large festival is small, and those acts tour in cycles.
Exclusivity clauses restrict where an artist can play within a radius and a time window, which shapes routing.
And the booking is done by a limited number of agencies with relationships across many events.
The result is that a season's festivals draw from the same pool at the same time, which is a structural outcome rather than a lack of imagination.
What is genuinely improving
Some things worth noting.
Safety practice has improved substantially, driven by regulation and by hard lessons.
Accessibility provision at established events is far better than it was, with dedicated facilities and viewing platforms now standard at larger festivals.
And environmental practice has moved, with reductions in generator use, waste and single-use materials, driven partly by regulation and partly by attendee expectation.
What attendees might reasonably conclude
That prices reflect a cost structure rather than pure extraction, mostly.
That the small independent events are the ones at genuine risk, and that attending them has more effect than complaining about the large ones.
And that buying early matters more than it appears, since advance sales are what allow an event to commit to costs at all, and the events that fail frequently do so because the advance did not arrive.
The volunteer question
An arrangement worth examining.
Many festivals rely substantially on volunteers, generally exchanging a shift pattern for entry.
For attendees it is a legitimate way to attend cheaply, and for organisers it fills roles that would otherwise be a significant cost.
Where it becomes questionable is when volunteers perform work that would otherwise be paid employment, which has attracted scrutiny in some jurisdictions.
The distinction that generally matters is whether the role is genuinely peripheral or is core to running the event, and events vary considerably in where they draw it.
What a bad year looks like from inside
The sequence is recognisable and quick.
Advance sales come in below projection. The headliner has already been contracted at a fee set against the optimistic number.
Costs are committed — infrastructure is booked, staff are contracted, licences are paid.
The available responses are to reduce scope, which damages the offer and the reputation, or to proceed at a loss and hope the following year recovers.
Most choose the second, which is why festivals frequently fail in the year after a poor one rather than during it.