Splore's 2025 cancellation is predictable and shocking at the same time.

Confirmed: Australia's music festival chaos has arrived in New Zealand.

Stop dancing.

Put the costumes away.

Everything’s on ice.

The party’s over.

That’s the takeaway from the bombshell news dropped on our music festival industry yesterday.

On 2pm Friday, Splore’s organisers took to Instagram to announce their beloved festival would take 2025 off after suffering an under-performing 2024 event.

“We recognise that the cost of living has surged, placing strain on our whānau making it too hard for many to attend Splore,” they said. “This coupled with rising costs means it is very challenging staging a high content festival like Splore in this environment.”

In that post, Splore pitched its year off like this: “This is a time for manaakitanga, a moment to catch breath and recalibrate … Without the hustle, there is space to create and grow. The fallow year is no retreat; it’s a conscious choice to nurture the roots that sustain us.”

Splore, it is worth remembering, is New Zealand’s longest-running festival, and has been fully operational since 1998. It has outlasted many of its 90s peers, including the Big Day Out and Parachute. (It was biennial for some of that time, meaning Rhythm & Vines, which began in 2003, has hosted more events.)

Party’s Over: Splore is held annually at Tāpapakanga Regional Park.

All of that makes sense. I’d heard from those that attended Splore this year that it remains a very fun three-day event with a unique spirit and passionate crowd, but that this year’s festival indeed felt light on numbers.

But in an interview with RNZ, festival producer Fryderyk Kublikowski painted a different picture.

He revealed a festival landscape in disarray, one Splore wanted no part of.

He said this:

"It looks like it's going to be a really tough year for festival promoters and, rather than jump in and compete for attention and our community's hard-earned dollars, we can see that everyone's going to be doing it tough probably in the next 12 to 18 months, so it feels sort of like the socially responsible thing to do."

He also said this:

"A lot of event and festival promoters are struggling, there's a lot of festivals who take a financial hit and will go on sale almost immediately for the following year, you know? They're sort of covering their previous year's losses with the following year's ticket sales, which isn't a very responsible thing to do.

You don’t often hear promoters talking so openly and so honestly.

You don’t often hear them hitting out at fellow promoters.

They are optimists at heart.

It’s the thing that helps them create festival magic.

But we just had a summer unlike any other, with more festivals than ever before.

We already know some of them haven’t survived: Nest Fest is in receivership and won’t be returning, and Morningside Live Block Party never got out of the blocks.

We also know Australia’s festival landscape is being absolutely pummelled by a multitude of forces, and what happens over there inevitably crosses the ditch at some point.

That point seems to be now.

Clearly, next summer we’re going to have far fewer festivals to choose from.

Yet, I can’t help but notice another trend.

On the same day Splore cancelled its 2025 event, tickets for a second Chris Stapleton Spark Arena show – in March next year, around the same time Splore 2025 won’t be happening – went on pre-sale.

I joined the Ticketmaster queue out of interest.

Then this happened…

More than 65,000 people were completely and utterly desperate to pay up to $499 for a single ticket to the American country star’s 2025 show.

Rather than a cost of living crisis and an overstacked festival scene, I’d point to this as the bigger trend affecting festival attendance.

Right now, any spare money we have isn’t going to three-day boutique festival experiences.

It’s going to Fred Again, who sold out two Spark Arena shows with just a week’s notice.

It’s going to SZA, who begins a run of three Spark Arena shows tonight, with tickets costing $250+.

It’s going to Pearl Jam, Coldplay and Twenty One Pilots, who all play here in the same week in November, with many tickets over the $200 mark..

It’s going to The Weeknd, who has two sold out Eden Park shows to reschedule.

Just this week, as Daylight Savings kicks in and winter kicks off, UB40, Shapeshifter and Fisher announced big runs of shows.

If Beyoncé gets her act together and comes down under, it will go to her too.

So acts that used to headline festivals are now finding they can make more money headlining their own shows, many of them in stadiums.

They’re coming here, in record-breaking numbers.

And by the looks of those Ticketmaster queues, we’re prepared to pay through the nose to go to them.

Faced with that threat, it’s no wonder festivals can’t get a look-in.

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