Another summer festival bites the dust. What does it mean?

We won't be taking a trip to Paradise City after all. Plus, all the news, features, links, gossip, new music and deep dives you need to kick off your weekend...

It is, promoters say, “unfortunate”. They say they were forced to make a call they didn’t want to make, and they’re going to take some time out to recover. “We’ve never had to cancel before,” Paul Brommer told NZ Herald after calling off his February event, Paradise City. “My team are gutted as all we wanted to do was to deliver an epic festival.”

Brommer, who put on last year’s surprise sell out Limp Bizkit show, was talking about Paradise City, a one-night rock festival first booked for Victoria Park, then moved to Trusts Arena. It was due to be headlined by nu-metal act Alien Ant Farm, with Blindspott and Drowning Pool also on the bill, among others. Brommer’s confirmed it’s no longer going ahead. The cancellation means a Wellington sideshow isn’t happening either.

To Brommer’s credit, he’s being open and honest about the reasons behind his decision. “This year, with low ticket sales, we had no choice but to make the tough decision of cancelling,” he said. “It’s an interesting market at the moment.”

Is it what. Paradise City is the third major festival to be postponed or cancelled in just the past month. Four Juicy Fest dates were canned just two weeks before the New Zealand leg was due to kick off over what promoters called “tough opposition from authorities”. That meant four dates on The Timeless Tour also had to be postponed.

Remember: Splore is taking this year off, Bay Dreams isn’t going ahead, Nest Fest has gone under, Eden Fest has gone into liquidation, Morningside Live has made no sign of a comeback, and Laneway is refunding all tickets sold to 16-18-year-olds after being refused an appropriate liquor licence. (“Devastating” is how two teens described that decision to me.)

Add in the rest of the cancellations that remain fresh in the memory – The Weeknd’s two Eden Park shows, Blink-182’s sold out Christchurch show, Tenacious D’s entire tour, Childish Gambino’s Spark Arena show, a Thirty Seconds to Mars performance, Xzibit’s one-day hip-hop festival and a show by veteran rap group Public Enemy – and it sure adds up to a messy live musical landscape.

So why’s this happening? Social media offered several misguided theories on why Paradise City went under. Some cited a lack of promotion, while others suggested prices were too high, the show was in the wrong venue, or, in one dreamer’s case, that German metallers Rammstein should also have been booked on the bill to make it work. (To be fair, that would have ruled.)

It’s usually tough to know why a festival has really fallen over. The real reason could be a combination of all of those factors, and others. Alien Ant Farm haven’t performed here since 2004, and they only have a handful of hits to their name, one of which is a cover. Add in all-time high ticket prices, tight wallets thanks to a cost-of-living crisis, and a year stacked full of visits by huge names – Alien Ant Farm, or Metallica? – and it doesn’t seem like that much of a big deal.

But perhaps it does signal a wider trend. In Australia, festivals have fallen over at an alarming rate. Over there, few seem able to make multi-stage events work, a government inquiry is underway, and everyone is pointing fingers, many of them at Live Nation. Perhaps that trend has arrived here, and we’re only just noticing it. (It needs to be said: Electric Avenue is, quite obviously, bucking all of the trends.)

But perhaps change is in the air. After last weekend’s super-enjoyable Fisher show, I still have the promoters’ words rattling around in my head. When I spoke to them, they’d just axed their own festival, Bay Dreams, and were instead focusing on chasing the ‘Fred Again effect’. That means rather than building a festival line-up, they were booking one big name and bringing everyone together for that sole artist...

“I believe right now and for the foreseeable future there are some superstars shining through. Generally, those are the shows that are doing really well ... all of the same type of people in the same area who love it … It could not have been a better decision for us.”

You can’t argue with the 40,000 fans who attended Fisher’s Christchurch and Auckland shows last weekend for a super-fun night that I went to, had far too much fun at, and wish was happening again very soon. Put simply: Alien Ant Farm just didn’t have the same pulling power, and no one cares about the undercard. Promoters take note: there might be a lesson worth hooking onto in there.

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Everything you need to know.

• This weekend, Luke Combs takes over Eden Park for two shows. Then, in March, Chris Stapleton does the same thing at Spark Arena. When did we become so obsessed with country music? It is, Lloyd Burr finds, all about timing. “When people are going through hard times, they turn to music they can relate to and that is often the lyrics of country music,” one expert tells him in this fascinating explainer for Stuff.

• The Robbie Williams biopic Better Man, which features the UK pop star being played by a CGI chimpanzee, has flopped so hard it’s trending on US TikTok, perhaps the last thing to ever do so. So I really enjoyed this explainer by The Guardian that examines why America just doesn’t get it. “Williams has always struggled to make it in the US,” writes Sam Wolfson, “and his life story has already been emptied and licked clean”.

• It’s an event that swaps drinks and drugs for bananas and kombucha. So why would anyone get up for a dawn rave? “There’s some magic there,” Morning People’s Jamie Newman tells RNZ. He’s been putting on early morning dance parties for the past 12 years. “It's really powerful and it's really cool to strip away all the distractions from dance music culture to just have it about the music and to see what it is actually truly about … It's really freeing just dancing in the dark.” I need to go to one of these.

• When Marcus J Moore set out to write a book about De La Soul, he never thought the band wouldn’t help him out – let alone denounce his work. That’s what happened. Now, Moore is trying to set the record straight by addressing the controversry surrounding High And Rising. “It was disappointing, because they were quite literally judging a book by its cover, without having read the book,” he tells this Rolling Stone podcast that’s well worth a listen for hip-hop fans.

• Speaking of podcasts, the latest episode of Song Exploder is super touching. It features Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker breaking down her solo song ‘Sadness As a Gift’. It’s thoughtful and delightful, a heartfelt examination of how a song really comes together in the moment. (A thought: Someone should make an Aotearoa version of this podcast; I’d love to hear ‘Royals’ or ‘Loyal’ broken down on this way.)

• Kaytranada played a sold out show in Auckland on Thursday night with Channel Tres in tow and I can’t find a single review of it anywhere. I would have been there but was instead taking in the blistering two-hour Idles gig, a thoroughly angsty, intense and enjoyable night. There are reviews of that one: “Beautiful chaos,” says bFM; “There was a good feeling in the air,” writes Chris Philpott.

• I’m late to this but The Guardian’s top 10 album cover awards for 2024 are a delightful waste of 10 minutes, but I disagree immensely with the inclusion of the Foster the People cover. That is not art; that’s a stone cold mess, and I never want to see it again.

• Are racially-tiered ticket prices a thing? After an outcry over ticket sales for a Christchurch event offering cheaper prices for those of Māori and Pasifika descent, it’s unlikely: the NZ Herald reports a complaint has already been laid with the Human Rights Commission.

• Look, I would never normally share the music of OK Go, the Chicago group that seems like a project created to soundtrack music videos you watch once, go, ‘Ahh,’ then never watch again. But! It’s been 20 years since their first video and they’re celebrating that milestone with ‘A Stone Only Rolls Downhill,’ a middling song with a baffling video filmed using 64 cellphones. My brain hurts. Watch it once and go, ‘Ahh’.

Bonus beat.