Within the last year, the festival space has experienced a more volatile market. Rising production costs and more frequent severe weather events have put events at risk, and at Billboard’s Live Music Summit at the 1 Hotel in West Hollywood, C3 Presents’ Huston Powell remarked, “It’s a year-by-year fight to stay alive.”
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Joined by Powell, Heather Kolker of Dreamshop Management, Jeremy Shpizner of booking agency ROAM, Melissa Ormond of Goldenvoice and Allen Scott of Another Planet Entertainment and moderated by Billboard senior correspondent Katie Bain, the conversation spanned how to determine a good festival headliner, navigating severe weather, rising costs and the best time to announce a lineup.
For those looking to create their own festival, expenses have only gotten higher in recent years. “The inflation in the United States since 2021 has probably been around 27%,” Scott says. “For Outside Lands specifically, we’ve gone up 60% in our cost. It is extraordinary. And ticket prices can’t keep up with that. You have different price points and additional sponsorship, getting more top-end experiences to keep your general admission ticket price lower.”
Kolker added, “You can get into a situation where you get a festival offer that might make sense for where you are already, but with the cost of buses and crew coming out of COVID, it’s unaffordable.”
To help with keeping ticket prices at a reasonable rate for the average fan while still helping festival promoters make money, Ormond notes premium experiences are becoming more of a necessity. “There’s a segment of the population willing to pay for a higher-end experience, and that helps take some of the pressure off.”
Weather events have also led to festival cancellations. Bonnaroo announced it will be taking a year off in 2027 in order to let the grounds rest for a year following severe weather events in both 2025 and 2026.
“We have been dealing with weather conditions in New Orleans or Western Michigan forever,” Ormond said. “But California — we had never evacuated a festival until Cruel World in 2023. We had never evacuated the desert in 25 years of Coachella, and we evacuated twice in the last six months.”
The science behind determining the best festival headliner has also become more complicated in recent years. As more acts grow into stadiums, those booking festivals note that they’re more so looking for an artist who is going to break.
“You have to adapt,” Powell says. “There’s a certain level of act that disappears off your radar if you’re anybody except Coachella — the Harry Styles, the Justin Biebers — because we don’t spend enough to get those acts. They’re in the stadiums. So you have to try to get ahead of the curve. If you’re lucky, you get those acts who are on that next cycle… They used to say you have to elevate the new headliners. Now we have no choice.”
