Festival season’s ramping up. The lineup announcements are dropping. The hype’s building. And if you’ve worked in this industry as long as I have, you’re already predicting which events will be train wrecks.

Because the same mistakes happen every single year. Promoters don’t learn. They think their festival will be different. It never is.

Here’s what keeps going wrong.

Capacity Planning Like It’s 2010

The biggest recurring disaster: wildly optimistic crowd estimates.

Promoters see a few viral TikToks about their lineup and convince themselves they’ll sell 15,000 tickets. They book a venue that fits 15,000. They hire bar staff and security for 15,000.

Then 9,000 people show up.

Or worse: 22,000 people show up because they didn’t properly control entry points and half the crowd jumped the fence.

I’ve seen both scenarios destroy festivals financially. You can’t recover from a 40% under-sell. And you definitely can’t recover from exceeding your licensed capacity and getting shut down by authorities mid-event.

Conservative estimates with infrastructure that can scale up if needed. That’s the answer. Nobody does it because nobody wants to admit their festival might not be the next Splendour.

The Payment Pipeline Nobody Thinks About

Artists get paid. Seems simple, right?

Wrong. This is where half of festival promoter relationships with agents fall apart.

Here’s what actually happens: You book fifteen bands. You agree to payment terms. Then day-of, you realize you need to pay the afternoon acts before they go on stage, but your bar revenue hasn’t come in yet, and your primary sponsor payment is still in processing, and suddenly you’re scrambling to cover $30,000 in appearance fees with money you don’t have liquid.

Team 400 worked with a festival here in Sydney last year to build a proper payment scheduling system that tracked cash flow in real-time against contracted payment obligations. Sounds basic. It was revolutionary for the promoter who’d been managing it all in spreadsheets and stress.

The number of festivals that wing this is baffling. You’re moving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Build a system.

Weather Contingency Means Actual Contingency

“We’ll move it indoors if it rains.”

Cool. Have you booked the indoor space? Confirmed it’s available? Checked that your insurance covers the move? Coordinated with artists about the different technical setup?

No? Then you don’t have a weather contingency. You have a vague hope.

I watched a festival in 2024 try to pivot to an indoor venue when a storm hit. The indoor space wasn’t actually available because they’d only verbally discussed it. Three headliners walked because they weren’t contractually obligated to perform in a different venue. The whole event collapsed.

Weather contingency planning means: locked-in alternate venue, insurance that covers it, artist contracts that specify backup arrangements, communications plan for notifying ticket holders.

Anything less is fantasy.

The Sound Engineering Illusion

Promoters chronically underbudget sound engineering. They hire the cheapest PA system they can find and wonder why the acoustics are rubbish.

Here’s the reality: outdoor sound engineering is difficult and expensive. You’re dealing with zero natural acoustics. Sound travels unpredictably. You need serious equipment and experienced engineers.

Cutting corners here guarantees a bad audience experience. People don’t remember the lineup as fondly when they couldn’t actually hear the music properly.

And if you’re in a residential area? Proper sound engineering isn’t optional. It’s the difference between managing noise levels and getting shut down by council.

Staffing for the Worst Case

Every festival plans staffing for the ideal scenario. Everyone’s well-behaved, entry flows smoothly, no medical emergencies, no conflicts.

That’s not what happens.

You need more security than you think. More medical staff than you think. More bar staff than you think. And you need them trained for crisis scenarios, not just standard operations.

I’ve seen festivals descend into chaos because they had one medical tent for 10,000 people. When a heatwave hit and twenty people needed treatment for dehydration simultaneously, the whole system broke down.

Same with security. If a crowd crush situation develops, you need enough trained staff to manage it immediately. Not eventually. Immediately.

Budget for worst-case staffing. If you don’t need it, great. If you do need it and you don’t have it, people get hurt.

The Artist Hospitality Farce

Rider requirements exist for a reason. Sometimes those reasons are ego. Often they’re practical.

Your artist needs a quiet space to warm up? That’s not a diva demand. That’s vocal health.

Specific food requirements? Might be allergies, might be dietary restrictions, might be diabetes management.

I’ve watched promoters dismiss rider requests as unreasonable, then act surprised when artists are pissed off or can’t perform at their best.

Just meet the riders. If you can’t afford to meet the riders for the artists you booked, you booked artists you can’t afford.

Ticketing Tech That Actually Works

The number of festivals still using janky ticketing systems that crash when sales go live is absurd.

You know when your sale starts. You know you’ll get traffic surge. Why is your ticketing platform from 2015 and hosted on infrastructure that can’t handle it?

Use a proper ticketing system with actual server capacity. Integrate it with your entry system so you’re not manually checking tickets at the gate.

This is not the place to save money.

Communication When Things Go Wrong

Things will go wrong. An artist will cancel. Weather will interfere. Equipment will fail.

How you communicate these issues determines whether your audience is annoyed or furious.

Tell people immediately. Be specific about what’s happening and what you’re doing about it. Don’t go silent and hope they don’t notice.

I’ve seen festivals lose their entire reputation because they didn’t communicate a stage time change and people missed their favorite act. That’s not a crisis. That’s a communications failure.

Learning Nothing from Last Year

The truly baffling thing is that most of these mistakes are documented. There are case studies. There are industry reports about what went wrong and why.

Promoters just don’t read them. They assume their situation is unique.

It isn’t. The same logistical challenges exist for every outdoor music festival. The same failure points. The same solutions.

Your festival is not so special that established industry practices don’t apply.

What Actually Works

Conservative estimates. Robust payment systems. Real contingency plans. Proper sound engineering. Worst-case staffing. Artist respect. Modern ticketing. Transparent communication.

None of this is revolutionary. It’s boring, competent event management.

But boring competence creates great festivals. Chaos creates viral disaster stories and bankruptcies.

If you’re promoting a festival this year, please learn from the decades of mistakes that came before you. The industry’s figured out what works. Just do that.

Your artists will thank you. Your audience will thank you. And you might actually make money instead of becoming another cautionary tale.