What happens when you take hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue out of our local economy?
We’re about to find out. The Falls Festival is no more. Splendour has finished. And this year Festival Director Peter Noble told us this would be the last Bluesfest. It seems unfathomable that our iconic signature event will be no more.
It’s just not possible for large-scale events like this to continue.
And this has to hurt. We may not feel it instantly, but over time, when the three single biggest stimulators of the local economy are absent, it’s without a doubt that our entire region is going to feel the pinch. Each festival literally brought in tens of millions to boost our local economy every year. Over a decade that will be a significant financial loss. Hundreds of millions of dollars not coming here.
For many of the market stalls it was where they made their primary income each year. There’s accommodation and transport providers. There’s site management workers. There’s sanitation services. There’s security firms. There’s sound engineers and film production teams. There’s printing and publicity services. There’s local media. There’s restaurants and bars and fashion boutiques and shoe stores. Hundreds, if not thousands of people in the production pipeline.
The economic stimulus a big festival provides is almost impossible to map with accuracy, as the money moves through our community, and into the broader NSW and national economy rapidly. There’s barely an industry here that doesn’t benefit, even if indirectly, from the larger festivals. For most of the local schools, raffling-off tickets to these events has been the income stimulus for their fundraising raffles for the last two decades.
From a creative and cultural standpoint, it’s the end of an era.
But things have changed.
It started with the disruption of the pandemic. The threat of cancellation meant people lost the confidence to travel, or attend a multi-day large scale event. Events themselves struggled to cope with maintaining their staff with no clear idea about when things might open again. The enormous burden of work and capacity it takes to book a festival, collapsed them sometimes in just a day.
Then there’s the challenges of climate change. Massive unpredictable and sometimes unseasonable weather events that can cripple an outdoor event. And now a cost-of-living crisis.
The festival sector is experiencing an unprecedented seismic shift. Production costs have increased by 30-40%. Event insurance alone is crippling. And that’s not something festivals can pass on to their punters as a massive ticket hike. It might shock many to know, that even a sold-out event will struggle to turn a profit on ticket sales alone. Festivals are cost-heavy. And many rely on bar revenue for their profit share. But people aren’t really drinking at festivals anymore. They’ve either given up or they can’t afford it. Without the injection of government funding, the model has become unsustainable. While the beneficiaries are numerous, they just can’t do it alone.
And to top it all off, people have changed. Younger generations exposed to music on the internet have much more narrowcast tastes. They’re not interested in attending events outside of their lane.
It’s not just business that’s impacted. For musicians and creatives, it’s devastating to lose these events that were so important in showcasing your work and connecting you with new and existing audiences. It’s our trade fair.
It seems the opportunity now lies in micro activations. Smaller, more niche events. One-day festivals. Pop-ups. There is a huge resource of experienced event creators going fallow and if we don’t use them, we’ll lose them.
And we’ll not just be broke. We’ll be worse. We’ll be boring.
Please, support your local festivals and events. A cost-of-being-boring crisis could be fatal.
- Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox column has appeared in The Echo for almost 23 years. The personal and the political often meet here; she’s also been the Greens federal candidate since before the last federal election. The Echo’s coverage of political issues will remain as comprehensive and fair as it has ever been, outside this opinion column which, as always, contains Mandy’s personal opinions only.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
