Forum topic: Community music festival issues a cry for help

Support your local independent music festival

Text of email sent to Livestock UK subscribers on 26th June.

It is coming to that time of year when we are all looking forward to the Livestock Music Festival. This year however things could be very different.

As you may know, Livestock is a community based not-for-profit organisation. Everything we have done over the last 13 years or so has been done through the generosity of the people who have purchased tickets to our events and enabled us to build what we believe are not only the best music events in the local area, but events where people can come which are inclusive, and importantly accessible to families and the wider community. We do not receive any corporate sponsorship or other outside funding.

The independent live music sector is under extreme economic pressure and we unfortunately, like many others, are suffering under the pressures of spiralling costs and the cost-of-living crisis. Costs for much of the festival infrastructure, bands and other services we need to make great, safe and accessible events have gone up rapidly in the last few years in a climate where we have not been able to increase prices to our visitors to keep up with these changes. If we had matched increases in costs to increases in ticket prices a standard festival ticket would be over £40, it is currently £32.50.

This has brought us to a difficult juncture. We have a date coming soon where we must seriously consider the economic viability of the 2024 Festival, as ticket sales this year are not keeping up with usual trends and in fact are falling behind at an alarming rate. We appreciate this is not unique to us and we are aware of over 40 similar events nationally which have already either gone out of business or been forced to postpone until next year. We appreciate that some of that may be due to us being forced to review our policies regarding alcohol due to safety and licensing concerns. But the potential shortfall is much greater than that. This has been compounded by two factors, the rain last year caused a significant financial loss on the day, coupled with slow sales this year we are in a precarious financial position.

We are reaching out to you to ask one thing.

If you are waiting to buy tickets to see what the weather or something else might be like later in the month, please consider buying now. If we do not reach a certain target in the next week, we will have a difficult decision to make.

We are working hard to bring the great event we know people want, hopefully we will see you all there on July 27th!

Livestock 2024 Music Festival: More information and to book