Bluesfest is back in a big way. And it’s not going anywhere just yet.
As the dust settles on Bluesfest’s 2025 edition, organisers are celebrating attendance of 109,000 – well up from about 65,000 last year – and planning an “encore” edition in 2026.
That most recent result is the third-highest gate ever for the Byron Bay camping fest, which began life in 1990. And, according to the team behind it, no other Australian festival has reported these numbers since before the pandemic.
“We’ve had the highest attendance of any Australian festival since pre-COVID at 109,000 attendances – the third-biggest event we’ve done in the history of the festival…. festivals are back,” comments Bluesfest director Peter Noble in a statement issued Tuesday morning, April 22nd.
“We’re the top-selling festival in the country, and we’ve worked hard to get here.” The opening-night crowd for the four-day event was the “biggest-ever”, reps say, as thousands headed to the Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm site to catch Ocean Alley, Tones and I, Tom Morello, and more.
What a difference a year makes.
Previously, Noble announced that 2025 would be the final year. In a subsequent interview published in UK-based trade publication IQ, Noble expressed a change of heart: “After the 2025 festival, as much as it pains me to say this, it’s time to close this chapter.”
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He added, “so what do we have to do. Do we have to say it’s the last Bluesfest to get people to focus on us?”
When Bluesfest collected best music festival at the inaugural Variety Live Business Breakfast in June 2024, Noble remarked that the festivals industry was facing an “extinction event.”
Speaking at Twilio in central Sydney, Noble remarked: “Now is not the time where we should be talking about what’s wrong with the festivals.”
Bluesfest 2024, he remarked, “got over 60,000 attendees. It was closer to 65,000. What did we get in the great days? We averaged 85,000. In 2022 we got 102,000.”
The popularity of this year’s event, he says in today’s update, “means Bluesfest fans have kept this dream alive. It’s a clarion call for me. People want this event. People want it to continue.”
Operating a festival isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s a “highly complex” business, notes Creative Australia in its 2024 report Soundcheck, a space that’s impacted by rapidly increasing costs and changing ticket buying behaviour.
Among the key findings of the report, operational costs were one of the most significant barriers to running a music festival, with almost half organisers (47%) putting their hand up. Others issues included lack of funding and grants available (39% of festivals say this has a severe or major impact on their event), insurance costs (31%) and extreme weather events (22%).
Tickets for the four-day Bluesfest 2026 “encore” are on sale now via Moshtix.
