Loch Hart's future-proof formula

In mid-December last year, the chances of Loch Hart 2024 taking place were looking slim.

With at least 300 more tickets needing to be sold before Christmas for the festival to go ahead, a final push for ticket sales was going to make or break Loch Hart 2024.

But instead of continuing to promote the lineup of musicians and comedians, share memes about the festival or pump their last pennies into ads, as many other festivals have done in this situation, founder Jayden Bath took to Loch Hart’s socials with a brutally honest and transparent rundown of the situation at hand.

“Basically, the ticket sales were just so dire that we thought ‘this can't run’,” recalls Bath.

But after discussions about cancelling, he was determined to make one last push for ticket sales.

“We can cancel, or we can just tell everyone that we will cancel if we don't see a dramatic uptake in tickets as soon as possible… The weighing up was ‘is that a really desperate thing to do? Will people judge us? Will that have the opposite effect?’

“So I just wrote [the post] how it was and stayed very objective with numbers.”

With so much riding on the impact of one social post, Bath and his team were nervously keeping an eye on sales in the aftermath.

“The day we made the post, I think we sold 10 tickets.

“I started planning the cancellation post. We'll just thank everyone who has come before. I literally started to think of the photo that I would post.”

But as the reach of Loch Hart’s final push continued to grow, thanks to the likes of Alex Dyson, who performed comedy at the festival in 2019 and shared the post to his 95k followers, sales started to pick up.

The next day, 20 tickets were sold.

Then 50 tickets the following day.

“We had volunteers, who had applied to volunteer and we'd already accepted, start buying tickets and messaging us saying ‘I’m still keen to volunteer. Just want to be involved, but also want to make sure that you can run.”

The momentum continued to grow and, much to Bath’s shock, Loch Hart 2024 was on.

Fast forward a month and the gates flung open.

Located on Kirrae Whurrong Country on a 2,500-acre farm on Great Ocean Road, a short drive from the coastal town of Princetown and about three hours south-west of Melbourne, the fifth edition was Loch Hart was officially official.

The infamous Great Ocean Road wind wreaked havoc on gazebos. Farm dogs ran amok and made festival-goers’ Sherrins their own. Punters from nearby coastal towns mingled with city folk. It was a classic small, regional music festival. And it was a ripper.

A slew of energetic, high-quality local acts, hand-picked by Bath himself, intertwined with a comedy hour just before sunset on the Saturday and a late-night program curated by PBS’ The Breakfast Spread host Milo Eastwood, combined for an astonishing amount of entertainment for the $199 ticket price.

However, it very nearly didn’t go ahead.

And with the likes of Splendour in the Grass, Groovin’ The Moo, Coastal Jam and Tent Pole Music Festival all having been cancelled in recent times due to a multitude of reasons, the 32-year-old is innovating to avoid Loch Hart suffering the same fate in 2025.

The Loched-In Club was announced one week after the 2024 event concluded, inviting punters to secure their spot at next year’s festival, plus a ticket to an exclusive launch party and a piece of merch, all for the price of $50 (that $50 would be taken off Loched-In members’ ticket prices when tickets are released).

Uptake has been solid so far, with 130 members as of late-April, which Bath says “feels good.”

“Just having people telling you up front ‘Hey, I'm keen for you to try and organise this again, so count us in’ is really humbling.”

Innovation like this is part of what has made Loch Hart a success since its first run in 2018.

Throughout his time studying law at Monash University, Bath uncovered a knack for putting together successful student association parties, laying the foundations for what would be a career in events.

After getting offered a graduate job as a lawyer, Bath requested a 12-month deferral and moved back in with his parents in the regional Victorian town of Colac to piece together the puzzle of his first-ever music festival and save up money.

After a two-year journey of research, preparation, booking, logistics and much, much more, the first edition of Loch Hart Music Festival went ahead in November 2018. But it was far from smooth sailing.

“We spent way too much money on it. And then lost an incredible amount of money. And all my income as a lawyer was just going straight into the festival.

“Despite that, I was significantly in debt. So we got a huge personal loan in order to not go bankrupt.”

Requiring financial backing to ensure the second running of the festival would take place, Bath turned to Matt and Sophie, the owners of the farm that Loch Hart is held on.

The duo agreed to help pay off the debts in exchange for a stake in the festival and, in Bath’s words, “it's been us and them ever since.”

The addition of comedy hour, an outdoor cinema and morning yoga over the years has made Loch Hart a complete package and it continues to evolve.

Such is the community spirit of the festival, keen attendees have added their own flavour, including a DIY painting installation – inviting any and every attendee to add their own touch to the canvas – and a giant steel orb that illuminated the path from the campground to the stage at this year’s festival.

Nurturing this tight-nit crowd at Loch Hart and embracing the unique camaraderie that takes place at music festivals has become increasingly important for Bath and his team.

The soon-to-be-announced Loched-In launch party will be an extension of that, giving future Loch Hart attendees the chance to meet each other months in advance of the running of 2025’s festival.

“I'm trying to achieve that people leave the party and as they're leaving, they have made new friends and they say ‘Oh, we'll see you guys at Loch Hart!’ And then they connect at the festival,” Bath explains.

With this early buy-in from Loch Hart-goers, Bath is hoping to encourage a change in purchasing habits from music fans to get them buying tickets early so that organisers, promoters and artists alike have more certainty about their events being able to go ahead.

While Bath is doing what he can to ensure the continued success of Loch Hart, he remains conscious that music festivals as a whole – not just his own festival – need to be in a better position.

“What I am hopeful for is that some big festivals announce soon and I think that they will have that stacked of lineup that they'll cause an immediate sell-out, which helps the ecosystem dramatically.”

“People ask me ‘is Splendour and Groovin’ cancelling good for Loch Hart?’ No, absolutely not. Bad news for festivals is bad news for all festivals. It's not as if we pick up part of the market – this is objectively not how it works. Instead, if the big events sell out, everyone's like ‘cool, that's good. Festivals are popular again. Let's go to smaller ones and more unique ones.’”

It remains to be seen if such a stacked lineup – or anything – will reenergise the festival scene any time soon, but with these struggles breeding innovation from Loch Hart and other smaller festivals, there is reason to be optimistic amidst a time of uncertainty.

Buy tickets to the Loched-In Club here.

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