How a wild week of concert chaos unfolded.
Line-up wrangles, wonky launches, a bungled pre-sale and a cancelled festival. What's going on?
On Thursday, June 6, Thom Yorke’s New Zealand fans were ready for action. Ticket pre-sales for a highly anticipated Auckland solo show by the Radiohead front man were due to begin at 11am.
Eager fans were told the only way to access those tickets was with a link made live through the band’s official website, Waste HQ. As the clock ticked towards go-time, their itchy trigger fingers were poised.
By 11.15am, the link wasn’t working. Anyone attempting to join the Ticketmaster queue without it was confronted by a spinning infinity wheel. Fans – including me – kept refreshing the page, but by midday, the link still wasn’t live.
By 12.30pm, same thing. They soon got impatient. “Gonna be some anxious Thom Yorke fans out there,” posted one on X (the website formerly known as Twitter). “I think their presale logic is borked.”
By 1pm, the link was finally working. But fans hadn’t forgotten. One suggested, because of the UK time difference, Yorke had gone to bed and forgotten to post the link. “Wakey wakey folks!” they wrote.
The following day, a Friday, a major hip-hop festival was cancelled. Organisers cited “unforeseen circumstances” as the reason for Xzibit, D12 and Obie Trice axing a mid-winter tour including Christchurch and Auckland shows over Matariki weekend.
(All three acts will still tour Australia, meaning those “unforeseen circumstances” may include low ticket sales; organisers haven’t responded to a request for comment.)
Just a few days later, things got even messier. On June 11, a Tuesday, Juicyfest, the hip-hop and R&B throwback festival that hosts four shows around the country every January and is among our most popular summer events, had some news to share.
It had launched its line-up on April 21, a full eight months before the tour was set to begin, with Ludacris, Tyga, Akon, Keyshia Cole and Blackstreet as headliners. Now, still six months out, organisers announced they were switching out their line-up.
“Unfortunately, 90s R&B group Blackstreet and hip-hop star Tyga are no longer able to be part of Juicy Fest 2025,” said a press release that announced the inclusion of nine new acts, including Jeremih, Twista, Ying Yang Twins, Fat Joe and Jay Sean.
Organisers sounded worried about how this news would be taken. “We’re confident the massive new line-up will cater to all R&B and hip-hop fans across Australia and New Zealand,” they said. “Don’t worry about ticket prices, the costs remain the same.”
Facebook followers seemed jaded. “How many of this line-up won't turn up?” asked one. That comment received nine likes – and a thumbs up emoji.
At almost exactly the same time, it was Listen In’s turn to mangle an announcement. Last year, the Australasian festival delivered Skrillex, Lil Uzi Vert, JPEGMAFIA and Coi Leray at an event I loved but was far too old to attend.
This year, 21 Savage had been booked to perform here for the first time in October, along with a rap and dance-heavy line-up that includes Skepta, Flo Milli, Sub Focus and Lee Mavtthews.
The problem? This was a slimmed-down version of the Listen Out festival touring Australia at the same time, a festival that has a better and bigger line-up that had been released weeks earlier.
New Zealand fans wouldn’t be seeing rising South African singer Tyla, or the rapper Teezo Touchdown, but Australian fans would. It was a slight that was noticed immediately. “Where is Tyla?” wrote one on Instagram. “Where is Teezo?” wrote another. (Organisers haven’t responded to a request for comment.)
Here, today, a week after all this chaos unfolded, I have a question: What the fuck is going on? These are not events being run by first-timers. Big names are involved, with people who have been around the block a fair bit.
They have done this many times over. And yet here we are, contemplating a single week full of bungled announcements, a ticketing screw-up and a major festival being cancelled.
I have some theories.
Maybe, after our stacked, slammed and supersized summer, everyone involved in live entertainment is exhausted and needs a holiday. I get that. I feel the same way. We had more than 100 separate festival events, along with many stadium and arena shows that made it almost certainly the busiest summer for live entertainment in living memory.
No one’s recovered from that yet. But perhaps there’s more to it. What if organisers are announcing shows too early, jumping the queue to lock in early ticket sales, then scrambling and panicking if pre-sale targets aren’t hit, budgets aren’t met, and they can’t afford their headliners?
Perhaps, as all those cancelled arena shows in America prove, we’ve reached the end of the post-Covid concert boom. Possibly we’ve reached a place where many of us have been able to see the acts we were desperate to see during lockdowns. Now, maybe we don’t want to shell out $499 for a single Chris Stapleton ticket or $550 for a SZA ticket.
Perhaps, in the middle of a cost of living crisis, when power, food, insurance and all other necessities are skyrocketing, when a dumb government tax break won’t even touch the sides, no one wants to spend $200 on a ticket to a music festival happening in eight months time that might go through several line-up changes or be outright cancelled before we get there.
Take your pick of one, or maybe all of those. It’s a messy time, and the stress seems to be showing. Whatever happens, it feels like it’s not over yet.
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