After underwhelming attendances this year and being hit with the late pull out of headliners Cee Lo Green and Janelle Monae, the Good Vibrations festival has decided to pull the plug on the event in February next year, although it claims that it will return in December of 2012.
FasterLouder reports that according to Sydney entertainment mogul and organiser Justin Hemmes, the events calendar in February when it traditionally was held is just too crowded. “It’ll be December, December next year… December temperatures are warmer and it’s just a better time for us. It was just getting flooded around that time [February].”
He also admits that the festival market is incredibly crowded in Australia, with bands constantly touring to make money in the absence of music sales and the wallets of punters maxed out by the proliferation of festivals.
Hemmes states “It was a tough year last year. It’s a very competitive market. There’s one hundred and one festivals on and there’s a lot of choice. Prices were very high for acts. There was a bidding war going on for acts which pushes the prices up. Prices are inflated, demand is down. And I probably didn’t pick the market as well as I should have… you’ve gotta have one bad year to keep you honest.”
Indeed, he confesses that he believes that the market is flooded and that there is an oversupply of acts. “I don’t know about the rest of the world but I know that we have more festivals here per capita than anywhere else in the world. There are definitely too many. And with that much choice punters are last minute buying which means that festival promoters don’t have any certainty at all; with any business you need some sort of certainty to take the risk. They’re big risks and they’re big challenges. It’s just a flooded market – supply and demand: economics class one.”
