Splendour In The Grass announces it will not return in 2025

Splendour In The Grass, one of Australia's longest running festivals and a key moment on the country's musical calendar, has today taken to social media to announce that it will not return in 2025.

In a post to the festival's Facebook & Instagram, organisers said that they needed “a little more time to recharge” and would come back “bigger and better” when the time is right.

“The rest of the festival team have still been busy cooking up some awesome new things for music lovers in Australia, but Splendour needs a little more time to recharge and we won’t be back this year. Think of it as a breather so we can come back even bigger and better when the time is right. Lots of other huge events on the horizon so keep an ear to the ground in the coming months – we can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on!”

Splendour's cancellation last year was due to 'unexpected events', which was one of a series of 2024 festival cancellations that prompted federal and state government's to address what many deemed a "festival crisis". This in turn lead to NSW's overhaul of their 2019 Festivals Act to, among many things, "include a $3 million two-year emergency package available for festivals over 15,000 people in size, seemingly available from the announcement date until June 30, 2026."

Read: NSW introduces the Music Festivals Amendment Bill 2024

Splendour, whose capacity was reported to be 50,000 patrons a day in 2022, would be able to access this emergency package. However, thus far there is no indication on whether Splendour had engaged state government in any way.

Splendour has in recent years been increasingly critiqued by punters and pundits alike for its broad musical offering, which for the first time since 2011 failed to sell out in 2023. Meanwhile, dance and electronic-focused festivals like Strawberry Fields and Pitch Music & Arts have enjoyed record sell outs in the last year.

Recent stats in the most recent International Music Summit (IMS) Business Report revealed that Australian fans, on average, stream more of the genre than anyone else on the planet.

Read: Stats reveal that Australians listen to dance music more than any other country

Meanwhile, in the final listener survey of 2024, triple j's total audience in the 18-24 demographic sat at 2.9% in Sydney, 3.6% in Melbourne, 11% in Brisbane, 7.8% in Adelaide, and 9.8% in Perth. Triple J has been a long running partner of Splendour, with many acts played across the national broadcaster regularly finding themselves among a Splendour lineup.

A cultural shift towards dance music and a move away from long-running musical institutions is clearly growing increasingly difficult to ignore.

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Jack Colquhoun is Mixmag ANZ's Managing Editor, find him on Instagram.