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When the music stops Smaller festivals felled by rising costs
The Guardian
|June 13, 2026
Hosting Scotland’s first Womad festival seemed like an easy sell for Glasgow, the country’s gig capital and self-proclaimed “dynamic global hub for music lovers”.
However, last week the internationally renowned event celebrating performance from around the world, staged in 30 countries since being co-founded by the former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel in 1982, was cancelled because of low ticket sales.
It is the 20th casualty so far this year as small and independent festival operators enter another tough summer facing a myriad of challenges, from belt-tightening consumers becoming more picky about how they spend their cash, to soaring energy and labour costs and competition from deep-pocketed industry heavyweights.
“Independent festival organisers basically eat and drink risk,” said Jon Collins, the chief executive of Live, the body that represents the UK’s live music industry.
“A year ahead they have to commit to a huge amount of cost to get it all booked in, and then have to believe they will sell enough tickets to deliver it, and hopefully make a small profit at the end of it. It is hard, there are far easier ways to make money, but they love it.”
Secret Garden Party, which featured acts from Ed Sheeran to Clean Bandit and attracted Prince Harry as a partygoer in 2014, shut down at the end of its 2024 event with a symbolic burning of the main stage, after its founder said it was “no longer sustainable for independents to run festivals”.
This year the dream of the team at Chai Wallahs, the touring festival live venue collective, to hold an event on the same site in Cambridgeshire also failed.
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