Rising Costs, Cancellations and Sellouts: Inside the Mixed Bag Facing European Festival Promoters

LONDON — “We live to fight another day,” says a weary but cautiously optimistic Oliver Jones, looking back on this year’s Deer Shed Festival, which featured headline performances from bands The Coral, Bombay Bicycle Club and rising Irish singer CMAT, and took place under crystal blue skies July 26-29 in Baldersby Park, Yorkshire.

“I don’t know if we’ll make any money. We’ll likely just break-even but there were a lot of positives,” says the festival director, who co-founded the annual family-friendly event in 2010. This year’s Deer Shed sold around 80% of its 10,000 tickets, but good weather drove healthy bar and food sales, helping ensure the festival’s survival for at least one more run, hopefully several more, says Jones.         

“The festival market is very volatile and there’s no big pot of money in the bank that will see us through a bad year,” he says. “Thankfully, this year appears to be a success. I feel like we’re back on track from pre-Covid times.”

Other music festivals in the United Kingdom have not been so lucky. According to the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), 56 music festivals have either canceled, postponed or closed for good in the U.K. so far this year, up from 36 in 2023, with Hertfordshire’s Standon Calling and El Dorado Festival, and Cheshire’s Bluedot among the big-name casualties.

“The economics of putting on a festival have become so tough because supply chain costs have gone through the roof. All our members are feeling the pinch,” says AIF chief executive John Rostron. He says that promoters of small and mid-sized independent festivals, which already operate on tight margins, are suffering the most from production cost rises of over 30% compared to pre-pandemic levels.

In response, Jones brought several services in-house, such as marketing and talent booking, for this year’s Deer Shed Festival. He says the event also relies on favorable rates from local suppliers and free use of the festival site. 

U.K. festivals of all sizes are also having to contend with the ongoing impact of high inflation, which peaked at over 11% in October 2022 and currently sits at around 4.2%, eating into music fans’ disposable income. The post-pandemic trend of audiences buying tickets later in the on-sale period, often waiting right up until the eve of an event, has added to promoters’ anxieties, says Rostron. AIF says overall ticket sales are around 4% down on last year among its 200-plus members.

“That 4% can be the difference between a promoter breaking even and them making a loss and not returning,” says Rostron, who warns that without government intervention the number of festival cancellations in U.K. could rise to 100 by the end of the summer season.

Festival promoters in central Europe are likewise facing rising production costs and changing audience tastes, although local live executives tell Billboard that the region has not been as heavily impacted as the U.K., where the launch of hundreds of new music festivals over the past decade has created a densely crowded market.

Nevertheless, a high number of European festivals have been called off this summer due to wide variety of factors, including low ticket sales, competing sporting events, lack of resources and personnel, and extreme rainfall. Among them: France’s Lollapalooza Paris 2024; Belgium’s Werchter Boutique and TW Classic; Ireland’s Wild Roots and Body and Soul; and the Netherlands’ Karnaval and Chillville festivals.

Promoters in France are also having to contend with a shortage of security and production staff because of the Paris Olympic Games, which runs until Aug. 11 and has employed a large percentage of the temporary workforce that typically works at summer music events. As a result, a number of French music festivals have been forced to either downsize, postpone until next year, or raise prices to stand a chance of breaking even.

“Many [French festival] promoters are quite afraid this season,” says Marie Sabot, director of We Love Green festival, which took place in Paris, May 31-June 2. Tickets for the 40,000-daily-capacity event — headlined by Burna Boy, Justice and SZA – cost 169 euro for a three-day pass, up 15% on 2023’s prices, with sales totaling 110,000. But bad weather in France and elsewhere in Europe in spring and early summer meant advance sales for We Love Green and many other festivals were slower than previous years, says Sabot, who represents festivals on the board of French live music trade group Ekhoscènes.

Sabot says an increase in the number of standalone shows by major touring artists such as AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift, who played four sold out shows at Paris La Défense Arena in May, has made a tough festival market even tougher. “We have too many headline shows this year,” she says. “The only territories [in France] where we have festivals that are [performing] quite strong are really far from the cities where they are not competing with big venues and arenas.”

Despite the economic challenges facing the sector, demand for live music still remains high across Europe, say executives. Many summer festivals, large and small, are sellouts, including Glastonbury, Green Man, Creamfields and Kendal Calling in the U.K.; Lowlands in the Netherlands and Tomorrowland in Belgium.

France’s Rock En Seine, which takes place Aug. 22-25 in Saint-Cloud and features Lana Del Rey, Fred Again… and LCD Soundsystem, is enjoying its “strongest year” in the event’s 19-year history, says Jim King, CEO of European Festivals at AEG. “We’re not seeing any significant shift in trends at the moment across our French business and Rock en Seine is selling at a much higher rate in advance sales than we have ever experienced,” says King.

John Reid, president of Live Nation Europe, calls the region’s festival market “massively competitive and always evolving.” He says that while there are always local challenges to navigate, the company is “seeing strong sales and continued overall growth” across Europe in 2024 with early summer highlights including Belgium’s Rock Werchter and the “biggest year ever” for Oslo’s Tons of Rock festival, which is now the largest festival in Norway. In the U.K and Ireland, Europe’s biggest live music market, Live Nation will host almost five million people at festivals this summer, says the firm’s U.K. and Ireland chairman Denis Desmond, “demonstrating that festivals remain vital to our cultural life.”

In order to protect the future health of the sector, live executives in the U.K. are calling on the newly elected Labour government to lower the rate of VAT sales tax charged on festival and concert tickets from 20% and bring it closer in line with other European countries, where the equivalent tax is typically set at under 10%.

Such tax benefits offer “a huge advantage” to the European live industry, says AEG’s Jim King, who calls on authorities in the U.K. “and all governments to follow this example.” The Association of Independent Festivals’ John Rostron says that reducing VAT on festival tickets to 5% — a temporary measure the U.K. government took during the pandemic – is the “silver bullet” the sector desperately needs. “Without it, we’re likely to see more promoters throw in the towel,” says Rostron.

Live executives in the Netherlands fear that they too could soon be hit by a rise in taxes on ticket sales for music, sports and cultural events with VAT rates due to increase from 9% to 21% in January 2026.  

“The festival market is always in flux,” says Berend Schans, director of the Dutch Association of Music Venues and Festivals (VNPF), who opposes the proposed tax rise. 

“Every year, some festivals disappear and new ones emerge,” says Schans. “However, we cannot deny that material costs, procurement costs, including artist fees, and personnel costs are skyrocketing, meaning that margins will be tighter for many festival organizers.”

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