Fights, missing headliners, a rape allegation and a huge cancellation.

The new festival season is off to a weird, troubling and downright disturbing start.

Oct 13, 2024

It should have begun with a bang. A little over a week ago, our brand new festival season got underway, six months of large-scale outdoor events beginning with tens of thousands of people heading to south Auckland for Listen In.

At Go Media Stadium, the hip-hop and bass-heavy festival began on a cold but otherwise fine Friday night with 21 Savage and Skepta booked to headline an event that came with a timetable that extended well past midnight.

How did it go?

Here’s The Spinoff’s review…

“Listen In proved to be a perfect display of the full spectrum of human selfishness … Through long lines where some punters scammed their way in, men pissing in the open and girls drunk stumbling over each other, walking into Listen In was like stepping under the circus tent … Elsewhere in the crowd, a man was looking for someone, anyone, to fight. It didn’t matter if it was the woman he king hit on the jaw, or the lads trying to take him on, the man was on an alcohol-fueled mission to ruin everyone’s time.

Yikes.

A few days later, on Wednesday, the long-awaited Laneway line-up was released, a full month later than usual. It delivered on what all those brat green billboards popping up around Auckland had promised: Charli XCX would headline the February 6 event, with Clairo and Beabadoobee in support.

I’m as happy as anyone that brat summer is coming our way. But this was a line-up that raised more questions than answers. Mostly, where is Chappell Roan, the fast-rising star creating havoc at American festivals who promised to be here in February? Is she even coming now? (I asked organisers; they didn’t respond.)

Things only got worse in the build-up to Saturday when Eden Fest, Auckland’s hip-hop and R&B festival, got underway. In the lead-up to the festival’s second event, organisers had culled it from two days to one, then lost two headliners: Miguel due to “an urgent family matter” and Busta Rhymes, who offered no apparent reason.

Then something even worse happened: Young Filly, the British rapper and YouTuber also playing at Eden Festival, was arrested in Perth.

Here’s The Guardian (trigger warning):

With three acts gone, complaints began mounting from festival-goers who demanded an explanation from organisers, asked them to stop deleting their angry comments from Facebook, and requested refunds. (Disclaimer: I had asked organisers if I could cover the festival; just like last year, they didn’t respond.)

So, across Friday and Saturday, as these events unfolded, the NZ Herald did something I haven’t seen in a long time: it did some music journalism.

This has all happened in the space of just one week.

This morning, we received more bad news.

Bay Dreams is cancelling its 2025 event.

This is a huge deal. Beginning in 2016, Bay Dreams was once the country’s biggest festival, attracting more than 50,000 people to dual events in Tauranga and Nelson, bringing artists like Cardi B and Diplo here, and even overturning Tyler, the Creator’s controversial ban to headline the 2020 event.

So, what’s going on?

Has Australia’s festival carnage finally made the trip across the Tasman?

Are we in trouble?

I’ve been asking questions like that all year.

Finally, we may have some answers.

The promoters behind Bay Dreams and some of summer’s biggest shows spoke to me in a lengthy piece for RNZ, revealing many of the troubling trends that are affecting our live music industry, and, thus, music fans.

Mitch Lowe and Toby Burrows say it’s hard to book the kind of headliners that would fill a festival like Bay Dreams, and those they can get have gone up in price. They say they tried to get Kendrick Lamar, but “headliners that were $300,000 to $350,000 are now wanting $1 million-plus,” says Burrows.

That’s making large, multi-stage festivals an incredibly risky venture. “To get the big artists ... you’re having to pay really big money. That puts you in a space where you're gonna have to sell 25,000-30,000 tickets to break even.”

They say fans don’t want to pay large amounts of money for big festivals that may come with timetable clashes, heaving crowds and transport issues. And they predict more trouble by the end of summer. “I think there's going to be a lot that fall off after this summer ... It’s hard to sell tickets at the moment.”

There is light at the end of the tunnel. The pair say small, boutique, niche and genre-specific festivals of around 5000 people continue to sell tickets. And they cite the “Fred Again effect”, the pulling power of one major artist attracting like-minded fans. Burrows and Lowe are behind January’s Fisher shows, which have sold nearly 50,000 tickets – the equivalent of what they were doing for Bay Dreams.

Fisher has sold nearly 50,000 tickets this summer.

It is, I believe, the first time we’ve heard promoters talking about this kind of stuff and revealing the troubles large, multi-stage festivals are facing. (Electric Avenue is the clear anomaly here.) And it offers at least a partial explanation for some of the events over the past week. You can read more here.

“The internet is starting to break under the weight of AI slop.” That’s what Kevin Roose and Casey Newton – the duo behind the great tech podcast Hard Fork – have to say about the tidal wave of misinformation surging after Hurricane Milton. (Ted Gioai has more on this via his excellent newsletter The Honest Broker.) This is my response: a newsletter that does not and will never embrace AI. Instead, it’s my thoughts, my opinions, my reporting, my journalism. It’s all me, and only me. If you’d like to support the work I’m doing, a subscription is cheap. Use this button…

Everything you need to know.

Speaking of festival costs, Glastonbury ticket prices for 2025 have been released – and they are eye-watering. Prices for a GA ticket to next year’s festival have gone up to £378.50, the equivalent of NZ$801.49. “Almost choked” and “getting ridiculous” are what some fans are saying about the steep rises. Metro has more.
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For anyone who misses out but still wants to go, RNZ has a comprehensive explainer on how to avoid getting scammed when buying resale tickets.
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