FESTIVAL FEVER: THE CROWDS FEEL IT

In the early morning hours of 6/15, the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival sold its final four-day pass, less than 12 hours before the first band started playing at the Superfly/AC Entertainment event, located an hour or so outside Nashville. The outing's success—attendance averaged 80k per day—is yet another sign that large festivals are not only back but often topping pre-COVID attendance levels.

Live Nation’s U.K. Download Festival, with Metallica as headliner, sold all of its 90k tickets for the first time in its 20-year history and broke the U.K. record for festival merchandise sales. The inaugural Sick New World festival, which kicked off the season in Las Vegas on 5/13 and featured a reformed System of a Down as headliners, sold out its 80k tickets during pre-sales. And the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival had its largest opening Friday ever, with 460k people passing through the gates over its seven days.

August shows are doing well months ahead of time. Lollapalooza’s Chicago edition has already sold out two of its four days, Friday (Billie Eilish, Karol G) and Sunday (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lana Del Rey). San Francisco’s Outside Lands has moved all of its three-day passes, and Insomniac/Live Nation’s Hard Summer, which returns to L.A. proper for the first time since 2010, sold out its Saturday show and two-day passes in early June.

“In 2022, Coachella was celebratory in a way I had never seen before. Same with Stagecoach,” AEG Presents North American Festival chief Melissa Ormond told HITS prior to this year’s festival season. “It was certainly a relief to see that the audience was comfortable coming back to a mass gathering. It’s taken some people longer to come back to it. Now, people are ready to get out and it’s translating to a lot of success.”

Coachella drew an average of 125k attendees per day this year, with both weekends sold out. In the U.K., sold-out signs are being posted for AEG’s July BST Hyde Park summer shows, featuring Del Rey, Bruce Springsteen and P!nk.

The return to festivals was initially felt in the first three months of the year in Mexico, Australia and New Zealand, where Live Nation reported 50% growth in fan count.

Europe, likewise, has come out of the gate strong in the early half of the season. Belgium’s Graspop Metal Meeting sold out its 26th edition, with 103 bands over four days attracting more than 220k visitors; France's Hellfest, with a lineup headlined by KISS, Mötley Crüe and Iron Maiden, also burned through all its tickets. Nova Rock Festival, the largest such event in Austria with 55k people per day, sold out early bird tickets in December. The eight-day, 17k-capacity Roskilde Festival in Denmark (6/24-7/1), meanwhile, sold out its Thursday, Friday and Saturday shows in February.

And the granddaddy of U.K. festivals, Glastonbury, has been sold out since April, even with a significant price hike to £335 ($428.10 as of 6/20) for its 6/21-25 dates.

The music event that runs longer than just about any other, the 11-day Quebec City Summer Festival, has sold all of its premium seats. No surprise considering its lineup of headliners—Del Rey, Imagine Dragons, Green Day, Zach Bryan and the act in the lead for most festival performances this year, Foo Fighters.

The Foos, the first of whose 17 North American festival performances this year was at Boston Calling over Memorial Day weekend, are dominating lineups along with The 1975, which will also hit 17 festivals around the world before beginning a 32-show North American tour 9/26 in Sacramento.

Kendrick Lamar is slated for seven festivals in Europe, seven in North America and two in Japan. All 14 of Mumford & Sons' summer gigs are at festivals, as are Eilish’s 10 summer shows and Del Rey’s six 2023 dates. ODESZA has nine festival dates (and 20 headlining gigs) between 6/10 and 10/21.

Also on the European festival circuit are Florence + The Machine, with eight dates, The Lumineers, who have 10, Lil Nas X, playing six and Guns N’ Roses, headlining five.

Stateside, The Killers have booked a dozen festival dates, beginning 7/14 at the inaugural Twin Cities Summer Fest at Target Field, home of the Minnesota Twins. Imagine Dragons and AJR are on that bill as well. It’s the only rock fest in the Twin Cities market, where multiple festivals have been canceled or shut down.

Another first: Live Nation has created the 1234FEST with members of Jawbreaker, to be held 9/9 at The JunkYard in Denver and 9/23 at Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Philadelphia, boasting identical lineups that include Jawbreaker, Rise Against and Rancid.

Also seeing a void and filling it are Primavera Sound and the EDM-centric Breakaway Music Festival. The former put up its flagship in Barcelona in late May/early June before heading to Porto, Portugal, and, for the first time, Madrid. Later this year, Primavera Sound is scheduled to hold back-to-back festivals in São Paulo, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Bogotá, Colombia and Asunción, Paraguay. Breakaway, which sold out Charlotte, North Carolina's Zmax Dragway in May and will mount six weekends between 7/14-15 in Kansas City and 10/13-14 in the Bay Area, closed a Series A funding round led by private investment firm RSE Ventures in June. “We want to see Breakaway in as many cities as possible,” co-founder Adam Lynn told Pollstar. “Obviously, it’s an expensive business and it’s hard to throw festivals with limited cash. The funding eliminates some of the pain points when trying to expand.”

Which means festivals are back in the black.

Live Nation, which produced 147 globally in 2022, will report the financial impact of the early festival season some time in July. It has predicted that the inflated costs of concert promotion in 2022 are a thing of the past and, as President/CFO Joe Berchtold told investors in April, “As a result of these improved conditions, we expect overall profitability per fan will again increase this year.”