Published
Thu, Apr 2, 2015, 12:47
- The Australian festival, which has taken place annually since 2006, has been crippled by low ticket sales.
Low ticket sales have forced the cancellation of Australia's Future Music Festival by its organisers, The Mushroom Group.
In a statement issued earlier this week, The Mushroom Group blamed dwindling ticket sales as the primary reason for the decision. The last two editions of Future Music Festival—2014 and 2015—underperformed significantly in terms of numbers, and the company's management concluded that running at a loss was no longer an option. Group Chairman Michael Gudinsk went on to explain that this dip in revenue has coincided with a dramatic increase in overheads, thanks to rising DJ fees and production costs.
Future Music Festival has been one of Australia's key dance music events since its first edition in 2006. Over the years it hosted a slew of big-name internationals, including The Prodigy, Dizzee Rascal and Paul Kalkbrenner, plus hundreds of DJs from around Australia. In many respects, it was the quintessential Australian electronic music festival: it followed the "travelling" model, with several dates around the country over consecutive weekends, and comprised a mixture of mainstream and underground music on its bill.
Organisers have stated that plans are being made to find some kind of replacement, but there's no word on what that might be. "We’re still in the very early stages of planning," Michael Gudinsk says. "I don’t want to give away too much information to our competitors but we will likely be focusing on a reduction in the number of markets and developing an approach that recognises the desires and needs of today’s music fan."