Caloundra Music Festival Is Permanently Cancelled

Caloundra Music Festival won’t be making a return.

After the 2024 edition was scrapped, the popular fest on Caloundra’s King’s Beach is permanently cancelled, organisers confirmed this week.

A multi-day annual event on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, Caloundra Music Festival is the latest casualty of the so-called “extinction event” which is sweeping through festivals in Australia.

In years past, its three-day lineup would typically stage a mix of A-list homegrown acts, with a smattering of internationals and rising artists, staged at the start of the warmer months and drawing crowds of 30,000 punters.

Busby Marou, Jack River, Wolfmother, Icehouse and Baby Animals have played recent editions and the show is a winner for festival of the year at the Queensland Music Awards.

However, on Tuesday, June 25, Sunshine Coast Council confirmed it had pulled its support for the show, blaming rising costs.

“Following the adoption of the 2024-25 Council Budget on June 20, the Caloundra Music Festival will no longer be funded by Council,” reads a statement, adding that every expense during the annual budget deliberations had to be considered.

Something had to give.

Those ticketholders who attended the 2023 event “were the lucky last to have experienced a Caloundra Music Festival,” due to a toxic mix of factors.

“Rising costs, falling ticket sales and uncertainty in the music festival industry were felt to be too great a risk in the current climate,” says Sunshine Coast mayor Rosanna Natoli.

“We recognise that music events are important for our community and Council will continue to deliver smaller events and programs.”

Caloundra Music Festival isn’t alone. A string of popular events have this year pushed back, or shut down for good — a phenomenon that Bluesfest’s director Peter Noble described as an “extinction event.”

Speaking at the Variety Live Business Breakfast on June 13, Noble said the squishy economy was to blame.

“People are doing it tough in Australia right now. And they’re not going out as much as they did,” Noble remarked, as he collected festival of the year honours.

“We’ve really got to be as one as an industry. We need to speak to government,” he continued. “We need to say this is the time you support our industry because we are facing an extinction event and that event can be looked at during the times of COVID, government delivered a lot of funding…come on government. Give us a hand up, we don’t want a handout. We can get through this because our industry is worth it.”

Operational costs were one of the most significant barriers to running a music festival, with almost half organisers (47%) putting their hand up, according to the findings of the Soundcheck report, published by Creative Australia in April.

A special panel at the inaugural breakfast dug deep into the problems — and the solutions — for festival-land.  

During the session, Dr Christen Cornell, research fellow and manager, research partnerships at Creative Australia, which presented Soundcheck, pointed out that the main ticket-buying demographic of 18-24 were found to have aged to 25-29, and that “ticket-buying behaviours had changed, so people are buying later.”

Operating costs are “just so severe,” added Live Performance Australia CEO Evelyn Richardson,  pointing out that some touring shows have reported blowout costs of 30% up to 70%. “To sustain the industry, when we talk with government, anything that reduces those operational costs is going be important.”