Music festivals are a threatened species that can die if they fail to adapt to the climate crisis.
While the high costs of insurance and production, the disturbances in the provision of chains and the abolition of the mass and transformations in consumer purchase habits They all contributed to a direct music sceneThe RMIT University report found that the unpredictable extreme weather is a key contributor to these factors.
Rain, heat, repeat: How music lovers with harsh weather will take place on Wednesday, with voting by Green Music Australia and the analyzes conducted by RMIT and La Trube University.
Catherine Strong, sociologist and associate professor of RMIT, said that climate change was no longer a far threat to the live music sector,; This phenomenon was already reshaping the behavior of the audience and the economy of living music.
In one week last month, 26 direct music events were canceled as the northeastern coast of Australia was prepared for Hurricane Alfred.
About 1155 people attended the events of live music and music festivals in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and Tempmania, between the ages of 18 and 60, were interviewed in the research. Nearly a third of the interviews said that they now consulted weather forecast before committing to buying tickets for a direct music event. More than a third (34 %) said that the harsh weather made them more cautious about buying tickets, as it rose to 44 % for those who described themselves as pioneers that disturbed regular live music.
One in every three said they will avoid attending a music festival if the temperature is expected to reach 35 degrees Celsius, and nearly one in every five said they are now buying tickets to cover the events affected by the harsh weather.
Strong said that the results provided an insightful look at the reason why consumer behavior has changed significantly in recent years, as concert pioneers delay their purchase for a longer period, which in turn caused the abolition of some major music festivals in Australia due to insufficient premature ticket sales.
In 2024, both splendor were canceled in grass and groaning.
“The normal way in which the festival industry depends on a certain number of tickets that will be sold early and often,” Strong said.
“People are now cautious enough about the weather that they started to leave their ticket to the point where they can look useful in the weather forecasts, and this in turn affects how to evaluate festivals whether it is viable or not … and to agree to many of them, and this is not practical.
The report found that 85 % of the festivals pioneers were affected either by floods, storms, heat waves, or the threat of forest fires at an event they attended in the past 12 months.
The report has warned that this seems to drive consumers to “safer” options, such as buying tickets only for large concerts in the squares and playgrounds covered, places where international artists such as Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga have the ability to fill the hours of tickets offered for sale, and a few capacity for locally cultivated verbs.
“The sustainability of Australian musicians who managed to produce a profession what they do is definitely threatened with these directions,” Strong said.
“One of the things that the festivals did is to provide space as local businesses reach the masses that they were not doing in another way. [Festivals] It was one of the stones that artists were able to eat in order to build their career. “
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The Al -Jahir player with the independent rock band, Spacey Jin, Pepa Lin, witnessed the effects of the harsh weather on the live music scene at the professional and personal level.
At the 2023 Rolling Sets Festival on the Central Coast in New South Wales, Spacey Jin was disturbed by an electric storm.
“Throughout the day, the groups were canceled, then the weather was cleared and the festival will start again. It was working throughout the day … We only ended up playing three of our songs in what was supposed to be a group for an hour.
In the previous year, she had attended what she indicated as “splendor in mud”, 2022 splendor in the grass festival In northern New South Wales, which left tens of thousands of festivals, they were stranded and left the pocket after heavy rains.
She said: “We were on the knee in the mud.”
“There is a level in which it is enjoyable, but if you are cloudy and disappear your tent, everything you have is completely steeped and you cannot dry for three days, this is no longer really fun.”
The report concluded that the music festival sector needs to adopt the music festival that it needs to adopt urgently, including the creation of permanent, flexible weather sites with thermal shelters, and water restarting stations that can be accessed with floods.
The report said that there is also a need for better contacts on weather safety plans and cancellation policies, but none of these amendments will be achieved without a federal cooperation and a greater government government.
