Australian Music festivals

I sat down and did some research on the different music festivals that exist in Australia, and found that there were A LOT. A lot of online music publications often references the fact that there are apparently "more music festivals per capita in Australia than anywhere else in the world". I found this surprising at first but once I actually started looking at all of them, I realised that Australia has an extremely impressive showcase of music festivals in a very diverse range of styles and genres.

Unfortunately this is both a good and bad thing. The oversaturated festival market in Australia means that many of them are dropping like flies. There's only so much money that a punter has to spend when it comes to the festival season, and unfortunately some of the festivals aren't making numbers. It also means that there's more competition for acts, and something of an ever-rising bidding war for talent has begun where much of the festival's money goes towards paying for the line-up. Over the past couple months I've watched some Aussie festivals crumble under the pressure, and listened to industry debates where key players have spoken out about how the riding bidding wars are hurting the local industry (see Ken West here talking about how this negatively affected the 2012 Big Day Out this year).

Becoming aware of industry issues  in the Australian festival market such as the over-saturation and the bidding wars makes me wary of entering it, because I know how competitive it is and and how hard it will be to stay on top. From my research into the American market, I've realised that while they are starting to have similar issues, they are nowhere near as bad. The main problem is the fact that Australian festivals are used to having to pay higher prices for artists to fly down here to perform, but now the artists have started to clue up to this fact and know they can charge exorbitant fees and the many festivals will keep bidding for the until the prices go up the roof. In the US they can't charge fees anyway near as high, and they also don't make anywhere near as much with the lower exchange rate. What I see here is a problem with international artists looking at Australia as a bank to come down and cash in at, damage the local industry, and then head off back to wherever they came from. I think it's important for me to be aware of issues like these as I look to forge a career in the industry. Looking forward to my plans to move back to the US next year, it also makes me lean towards working in the US event production industry more where the risk and cost isn't quite so high.

In amongst my research of Australian festivals, I came up with the following list of events that I would love to work for and be involved in. This is a good starting point for me getting experience, and knowing places to look for possible work with.

Australian festivals I would love to work on:

- Big Day Out
- Rainbow Serpent
- Eclipse
- Stereosonic
- Creamfields
- Summadayze
- Falls Fest
- Good Vibes
 - Soundwave
- Harvest Festival


This is obviously a small selection of the huge list of festivals Australia produces nationally, but I thought I would keep it small so I know the exact type of events I want to work towards producing, and also limit them to ones accessible to me here in Melbourne.