Bluesfest Byron Bay isn’t disappearing from the events calendar anytime soon.
Following a bumper edition for 2025, initially billed as its “last” party, and confirmation of another presented across the 2026 Easter long weekend, the famous fest is pushing on.
When asked if the show would go on into the late 2020s and beyond, festival director Peter Noble remarks, “Bluesfest is an institution. I don’t know yet, and I’m not getting any younger. Certain things are going to have to happen now for it to move into the next decade. And once all those things are put in place, I don’t see any reason why it won’t.”
The final attendance for this year’s four-day fest should tick over 110,000, Noble explains, as all stragglers are accounted for. That’s good enough for a top three all-time result for Bluesfest, which first opened its gates in 1990.
Early-bird sales for the next fest, set for April 2nd-5th, 2026, are rolling at about three-times the rate at the same time last year, he explains.
Bluesfest has weathered the storm, both figuratively and literally. The pandemic wiped out the 2021 edition. The next year, a last-minute cancellation due to a public health order from the NSW Government.
Then, in 2022, a return to business and upwards of 105,000 ticket sales. A solid return for a mudfest – thanks to the intervention of Mother Nature. The Tyagarah site, north of Byron Bay, flooded weeks before showtime, and again on the eve of the action.
Attendance for 2024 was down to about 65,000. Noble announced 2025 would be his last stand. Then it wasn’t.
“When we said, with Bluesfest, this just might be the last one, all of a sudden we’re selling more tickets than we have since 2022 when it all opened up after COVID,” he told a federal parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s live music industry last October. For 2024, “we saw a drop of 30 to 40 per cent in ticket sales. It’s not that people don’t have the money. We all know they squirrelled it away during COVID and we’re trying to get them, through many mechanisms, to not spend it all at once again,” he asserted.
“However, if you take the certainty out of our economy, if you take the optimism out of it, if you take out the ‘is the sun going to come up tomorrow?,’ then they’re going to sit on that money unless you find a way to make them spend it.”
And spend they did, on a 2025 lineup that included Crowded House, Chaka Khan, Toto, and Hilltop Hoods.
Reflecting on that change of heart, Noble recounts an approach by Destination New South Wales with a rescue package, one that didn’t eventuate despite his team chucking time and money – tens of thousands of dollars of it – answering the pipeline of queries from a big-four accountancy firm.
“We were just deflated over that,” he tells Tone Deaf. “It was like, ‘Was that a fishing exercise to get a whole lot of numbers about how festivals are doing?’ So within a month, I said the next one would be the last festival, I didn’t want to do it anymore.”
Now, with the 2026 show locked in, is Noble kicking back and putting the feet up for a while? Well, no. The veteran concerts promoter is still bitter about the government’s lopsided support for sports, where the festivals industry is being steamrolled into the dirt by what he has described as an “extinction event.”
“It’s not fair,” he remarks. “We are a bigger business than sport,” says Noble of the arts, “and we don’t get near the investment sport. And that’s what’s wrong. We’re not viewed as worthy.”
Bluesfest is one of five brands that secured a “financial lifeline” from the NSW Contemporary Music Festival Viability Fund, alongside Yours and Owls, Lost Paradise, Listen Out and Field Day. Considerably more is needed for an “industry that is severely underfunded by government,” he says.
Though no acts have been announced for the 2026 edition of Bluesfest, Noble can confirm one item: “I’ll be working my butt off making it.”
