Oxegen cancelled again for 2014

Oxegen 2013

Saturday 3rd to Sunday 4th August 2013
Punchestown Racecourse, Naas, Co Kildare, Eire, Ireland
189.50 euros for 3 days including camping

Daily capacity: 50,000

The organisers of Oxegen, Ireland's annual three day multi-stage music festival weekend held at Punchestown Racecourse, Naas, Ireland have confirmed the festival will not being going ahead this year.

Promoters MCD have issued a statement saying, "It is with regret that MCD announce that OXEGEN will not take place this year due to lack of suitable Headline Acts which combined with the financial demands by local agencies make it no longer viable to stage the Festival in its current form."

The biggest music event in Ireland with a capacity of 80,000, Oxegen (formerly known as Wittness Festival) has since 2004 hosted many of the big names in contemporary music. The event took a year out in 2012 before returning last year downsized from three days to two-and-a-half days and headlined by David Guetta, Calvin Harris and Snoop Dogg.

It would look as though the problems which Oxegen cite are unlikely to improve in the near future. Local agency costs are likely to remain the same in future years, with Ireland's economic recovery a slow process.

The growth of the American outdoor festival market in the summer is starting to cause a drought of touring big name American acts. This is likely to worsen in the next few years as more American events spring up with big investment keen to get in on the revenue and competition increasing for big crowd drawing bill toppers.

American talent is finding it easier financially to tour the American circuit instead of heading to festivals in Europe with international travel costs of hauling their equipment and personnel across the Atlantic. The increase in demand from large European festivals means there's a bidding war for the acts still available putting them beyond the reach of many events this side of the pond.

Music festivals in the US are a dominant force in their concert business these days, US promoters have managed to transplant the European festival culture there in just a few years, and they're still growing as a new generation of Americans see them as a rite of passage.

In recent years Coachella, has expanded to 2 weekends and enjoyed a record-breaking $47.3 million gross over those two weekends the first time it switched to this model. The traditional major events that have been established for a while have sold out faster than they've ever sold out with events like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, joined now by at least 30 more highly successful festivals, that have been able to expand and still sell out.

According to America's music press events like The Electric Daisy Carnival, a dance-music fixture in Las Vegas, attracted more than 300,000 fans in 2012, and its May spin-off in East Rutherford, New Jersey, sold 100,000 tickets and grossed $7.2 million. The Stagecoach country festival, held at the same Southern California site as Coachella, grossed $13 million in April. Both Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo hit their capacities, the latter selling 85,000 tickets. While smaller fests all had strong sales. Perhaps it wasn't the Olympics that resulted in so many mainstream events taking a year out but the draw of the festival dollar.

And Americans may still be a few years off hitting the saturation point that the UK saw five or six years ago. There's little sign of these major sell out events folding, although Seattle's Sasquatch cancelling it's second weekend this year shows that perhaps the capacity point is approaching. However, American big investors are prepared to keep financing events as they find their feet, learning from the European model that it takes time for an event to establish.

America has seen a decade of festival growth, and promoters like Live Nation, have predicted that with a whole summer of events now on the US calendar that they are at 'the very beginning stages' of what the festival scene will look like in America for the next decade. That's likely to be bad news for the European market who like to attract big name international talent over the summer to keep their tickets selling. It's no coincidence that European events are marketing more in the UK than in previous years, as they try to attract UK festival goers too

Oxegen could well be the latest indication that there's a change afoot in the fate of large European festivals. It's not all doom and gloom however, the UK scene has already seen a change in it's festival landscape with many smaller events establishing themselves in the last few years, looking to homegrown talent, and a fostering of the festival experience to sustain them.

This year it looks as though the total number of festivals on offer in the UK will fall short of the high totals of the last few years, but there's little chance of music lovers not being able to enjoy a weekend of sunshine and music outdoors somewhere in the long term future.

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