What is to blame for Splendour's cancellation?

“2022 is what killed them. Cancelling an entire day at the last possible hour is suicide.”

“This really isn't surprising. Poor ticket sales due to average line-up, cost of living pressures and general changing in buying habits.”

“Insurance has skyrocketed (up to 500% higher than pre-covie) and in NSW you have to pay through the nose for the pleasure of having cops show up to the event.”

“People want international acts but they cost twice as much as they do domestically due to exchange rate alone.”

These were just some of the opinions that were posited late last month when Splendour in the Grass shocked the nation by announcing its cancellation, just two weeks after tickets went on sale.

As one of Australia’s biggest and most iconic music festivals, welcoming up to 50,000 punters through its gates each year, Splendour is a story of longevity, local success and is a part of contemporary music lore in this part of the world. But its brand suffered undeniable damage, rightly or wrongly, on the back of COVID-forced postponements in 2020 and 2021, before a disastrous “Splendour in the Mud” in 2022.

2023’s event, headlined by Lizzo, Flume and Mumford & Sons, didn’t attract the usual, Splendour-like hype, with tickets reportedly down 30% on 2022’s 50,000 capacity, meaning the pressure was on organisers Secret Sounds to make 2024’s edition a bounce-back event.

Instead, we’re getting no festival. Why is that?

By far the most common reason for Splendour’s cancellation that was been put forward by Australians online was the lack of appeal in the lineup, which featured Kylie Minogue, Future and Arcade Fire in bold.

At first, I turned my nose up at this being the reason. Heck, this bill included Fontaines D.C., Angie McMahon, The Belair Lip Bombs, Sofia Kourtesis – some of my favourites from recent years’ listening.

And yet, post after post, day after day, I kept seeing criticism of the Splendour lineup. Then I remembered, I am just one person. And I am also probably not the typical Splendour-goer.

To get a more objective view of the lineup – and the festival scene in Australia as a whole – I, somewhat foolishly, put my spare hours to use by collating every single music festival held in Australia between the dates of 1 October 2023 - 31 March 2024, listing the name, location, start date and lineup of each.

The outcome of 20-plus hours of trawling Music Festivals Australia (shoutout to whoever puts this together), festival websites and local music media, such as MusicFeeds, was one bulky spreadsheet.

This document ended up totalling 198 music festivals, counting touring festivals as one festival, i.e. Laneway was only counted as one festival, despite playing in five Australian cities – this figure rises to 274 if these are counted as individual festivals – and 3,901 unique artists, separating artists when listed together as one act i.e. I broke up “Wax’o Paradiso b2b Lauren Hansom” to list Wax’o Paradiso and Lauren Hansom on individual rows in the spreadsheet.

Those are astounding numbers, considering this data only covers a six-month period, indicating that while times certainly are tough for venues, promoters and artists alike, live music lovers had no shortage of events to attend in the major cities across summer, assuming their pockets were deep enough.

But those who attended a number of those festivals may be experiencing lineup fatigue. Of the 3,901 artists, 191 featured on more than two festival lineups across the summer, led by Brisbane indie rock darlings The Jungle Giants and eccentric DJ Dameeeela, who both played a staggering eight festivals between October and March. Other big names who populate that list include:

• Sycco (7 festivals)

• Ball Park Music (7)

• Sneaky Sound System (7)

• King Stingray (6)

• Jimmy Barnes (5)

• Ocean Alley (5)

• Kita Alexander (5)

• G Flip (5)

• Ziggy Alberts (5)

• The Temper Trap (4)

• Paul Kelly (4)

• Daryl Braithwaite (4)

• Royel Otis (3)

And scouring this list with a Splendour lens, the argument can be made that there are too many repeat acts from the summer’s festivals.

34 artists (49.3%) on Splendour’s 69-artist bill on the main lineup have played at least one Australian music festival this summer. 21 have played multiple, and 13 have played three or more. This Splendour-specific list is spearheaded by Miss Kaninna (six festivals), closely followed by Sam Alfred, G Flip, Kita Alexander and Teen Jesus & The Jean Teasers who have all played five Australian festivals in the past six months.

But is that an issue? We, as fans of Australian music, should be celebrating the fact that a decent number of local artists are regularly getting booked for festivals. I have relished the chance to see my own Melbourne favourites Floodlights and Immy Owusu at festivals of late.

With almost 300 festivals to enjoy around the country, there’s an argument to be made that festival-goers are choosing smaller, cheaper festivals over the big fish to get their dose of live music.

Of the 274 tracked music festivals, there was a significant range of cities, regions and towns that played host to at least one festival.

The capitals welcomed a total of 149 (54.4%) events, while the regions experienced 125 (45.6%).

There was also balance in terms of cancelled festivals, with six of the 11 cancelled festivals from this window being scheduled for the capitals and five being set to be held in the regions, indicating that:

a) there is still a healthy appetite for regional festivals, despite the cancellation of Splendour and Groovin’ The Moo, among others

b) metropolitan-based music fans are still willing to travel out of their city of residence to regional music festivals

c) music festivals, or “festival culture”, across Australia is far from dead

While there are still a number of successful festivals that cover a broad range of genres, such as Meredith Music Festival and Laneway, which “this year sold more tickets than in any prior year,” we have seen an abundance of smaller, genre-specific festivals be successful. Hardstyle events, such as Sydney’s HTID, Metal-led events, such as the Alpha Wolf-curated CVTLFEST, and the R&B-focused Souled Out all looked to thrive this past summer.

The apparent success of such festivals has led to suggestions that the Splendour lineup was trying to cater to too many fan bases. From my subjective genre classification of each artist on the lineup, there was a considerable spread of genres, led by indie and pop – each of those genres were represented by over 20 artists on the lineup – while rock (16) and electronic (11) were slightly less well catered to. Hip Hop (9), punk (6) and R&B (4) all fell into single digits.

We can also see Secret Sounds’ efforts to cater to a wide range of audiences in its headliners – an approach that has not been uncommon across Splendour’s history – attracting three artists who carry very different fan bases that we rarely see headline shows in this part of the world.

Future last travelled down under in 2019 when he played at Rolling Loud Sydney.

Kylie Minogue hasn’t played live in her home country in over 12 months and hasn’t played a full-scale show here since 2019.

Arcade Fire, whose own controversies made them a questionable feature on the lineup in the first place, were last in Australia in 2014 for Big Day Out.

But that may be the answer to the lineup question right there. Punters have had the chance to see Australian artists aplenty over summer, so it was up to the big-name and international acts on the lineup to do the heavy lifting. And, for the average joe, with Splendour’s bar set so high from the star power of years gone by (think Kendrick Lamar, The Strokes, Kanye West, Florence and the Machine), was the lineup enticing enough for fans to spend $558+ on a three-day festival and camping pass, ignoring other travel, accomodation, food and drink costs?

For someone like myself, who goes through r/indieheads’ New Music Friday posts every week to find fresh tunes from around the world, the answer is yes. But most Splendour folk would not suffer from the sickness that I do.

Was that failure to land the big fish because of rising overheads, a weak Australian dollar, artists preferring to go on solo tours over festivals or a combination of all of the above?

Was it a lack of government funding (or did the government’s post-COVID funding create a “false economy”)?

Was Splendour’s cancellation partially due to global warming’s impact on festival cancellations, leading to hesitancy to buy tickets months in advance?

Or was it a lack of understanding of the festival’s audience?

Perhaps only Secret Sounds and Live Nation know the definitive answer to this question. And perhaps we, the public, will never know.

It’s undeniable that these are trying times for Australian music on the whole. So, if you are in the position to do so, go to gigs. Buy tickets early. Buy merch. Support artists via their Bandcamp. Every little bit counts.

If you have any questions about this article, the spreadsheet that I put together, recommendations for other angles to investigate with this data or you just want to chat about music in general, you can reach me at [email protected]. I would love to hear your opinion.