Inside Ireland's music festival industry: `You can haemorrhage money very quickly'

Irish Times

31-05-2025

Summer is on the minds of Will Rolfe and James Aiken – the summer of 2026, that is.
'We already have some headliners confirmed,' says Rolfe, promoter, curator and creative director of Pod Festivals. 'Just when everyone is getting excited for this year, we're starting to get excited for next year. You really don't get to enjoy it in the moment.'
The 2025 festival season has nevertheless shaped up nicely for Pod and
Aiken Promotions
, its owner since 2023, and the mood is upbeat in advance of this weekend's
Forbidden Fruit
at Royal Hospital Kilmainham, in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
'It's the longest-running music festival in Dublin city centre,' says James Aiken, a Pod booker, company director and third-generation concert promoter. (His late grandfather Jim founded Aiken.)
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'A portion of the audience will go because it's the June bank holiday weekend, but there is also a large portion who we have to engage every year with the right line-up,' he says.
As we talk, in mid-May, Rolfe can 'nearly touch-wood guarantee' that the 15,000-capacity Forbidden Fruit will sell out, while Pod's big camping event,
All Together Now
, shifted its final tickets in March – encouragingly, this is the earliest it has sold out since 2019.
The three-day, four-night festival – which takes place at the Curraghmore Estate, in Co Waterford, on the August bank-holiday weekend – did this while increasing its capacity to 30,000, up from 25,000 in 2024.
It took 'a little bit of time' for people to flock back to festivals like this one after the pandemic, says Rolfe, but the restart is now in full swing.
Across a broad spectrum of events, the Irish music-festival scene of 2025 is defined by vibrancy and resilience.
For the generations who can't afford a home, going to festivals is part of their revenge for the way life has treated them
The promoters and experts I speak to stress that financial risk is always involved and identify pinch points for smaller operators, in particular. Some events fell by the wayside in the wake of Covid, as costs rocketed and disposable incomes shrank. The sector appears in good nick by international standards, however, and continues to be buoyed by ever more experienced promoters, more deeply ingrained demand and a relatively fresh flush of big-name Irish artists.
'We're world champions at going to festivals,' says Michael Murphy, a music-industry veteran who now lectures at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dún Laoghaire.
When Denis Desmond, the founder of
MCD Productions
, 'went professional' in 1981, promoting Thin Lizzy at the first Slane Castle concert – with U2 'famously down the bill' – a switch was flicked, Murphy says.
Today, Desmond's Gaiety Investments co-owns LN-Gaiety Holdings, which is a joint venture with the global behemoth
Live Nation
. LN-Gaiety Holdings in turn owns MCD and Festival Republic, the operator of Ireland's biggest festival: Electric Picnic. This means that while Aiken is a significant player in an Irish context, it's small compared with Live Nation.
Select festivals – including the now 80,000-capacity
Electric Picnic
and the British music mecca
Glastonbury
– have such established brands that they will sell out before announcing a single name. For the rest, the line-up is critical to their survival, says Murphy. 'If you get the content wrong you could go out of business.'
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He draws a distinction between civic-minded, community-based festivals and the for-profit kind. As an 'old punk' he can remember the 'prehistoric times' when there was simply no sponsorship of music gigs. Once festivalgoing became a rite of passage, however, it was inevitable that alcohol companies would rush to associate their brands with moments of collective freedom and elation.
Economic dysfunction has, in a way, actually boosted the live-events industry. 'For the generations who can't afford a home, going to festivals is part of their revenge for the way life has treated them,' says Murphy.
Other factors have helped 'brilliant boutique festivals' flourish alongside the megaevents. Not everybody wants to be corralled on to an alcohol sponsor's patch – they want freedom from the corporate element, too. The age range of festivalgoers has also widened, as people now in their 60s were able to acquire an outdoor-gig habit in their 20s in a way that previous generations couldn't.
This demographic expansion is reflected in both the type of events being staged and their sponsors. The 'family music festival'
Kaleidoscope
, for instance, is officially 'Kaleidoscope presented by Glenveagh' Properties. The home builder's backing is 'essential to our growth', says Shell Holden, director of marketing at the events agency
Fuel
, which manages it alongside
Festival Republic
, Live Nation and MCD.
Kaleidoscope, held at Russborough House in Blessington, Co Wicklow, is built to prioritise accessibility and convenience, with baby-changing areas, dedicated sensory and quiet spaces, a family cooking zone and a campsite quiet-time curfew. We are, in other words, a long way from Oxegen.
Intergenerational custom also swells attendances at the
Big Day Out
, a one-day, 15,000-capacity 'pop and nostalgia' festival at TUS Gaelic Grounds in Limerick. The
CWB
-promoted event will be headlined this August by the boy band Blue.
Ticket-buyers who lived through the pop era of the 1990s and early 2000s bring their children, nieces and nephews – and, thanks to the music-recycling capabilities of platforms such as TikTok, they aren't dragging them, either. 'Nostalgic acts can have a resurgence,' says Paul Boland, one of CWB's founders.
His company aims to bring more national-scale events to the midwest region. But building 'from the bottom up' is not without its challenges. 'You can haemorrhage money very quickly,' he says.
Events are promoted 'subject to licence', which requires some nerve-holding. Insurance for extreme weather has also become harder to obtain since Brexit, while the splintering of social-media usage has complicated marketing efforts.
Boland is keen for the live-events industry to be taken seriously as the employment generator and sustainable economic contributor that it is.
'It brings confidence to a region as well,' he says. 'We take the attitude of The Cranberries: If everyone else is doing it, why can't we?'
What Murphy calls the 'DIY aspect to Irish music promotion' will also be in evidence this summer at Orlagh House, a converted monastery in the foothills of the Dublin mountains – and, crucially, only five minutes from the M50. This is where the promoter Úna Molloy, of the agency
Touring Pirate
, hopes to attract 'a more grown-up' audience to
Hibernacle
on the first weekend in July.
'Send the 16-year-olds to Longitude and come and have premium pints at Hibernacle,' she suggests. The festival has a full bar, a 'secret stage' that pops up between acts and a raft of Irish artists on the line-up, including Villagers, who will headline on the Saturday night. Its capacity is a genuinely boutique 800.
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Molloy says she wants to make the experience 'a little bit magical' – and flexible, too, for the contingent with responsibilities and/or babysitters to pay. Weekend-pass wristbands can be swapped, so 'a pal or partner' can go one of the nights.
Hibernacle has no sponsorship, no funding. 'It's just me,' says Molloy.
Like Boland, she cites the need to keep prices contained, but it's not easy. The ticketing service Eventbrite adds a 12 per cent booking fee, and, before she can pay anyone, 3 per cent of the ticket price goes to the Irish Music Rights Organisation, in royalties; 13.5 per cent of it will be VAT.
Smaller venues and promoters at the grassroots have 'really struggled' since the temporary 9 per cent VAT rate expired in September 2023, Molloy says. Indeed, in Britain, where the sector has suffered a high volume of casualties, the
Association of Independent Festivals
has campaigned for a time-limited 5 per cent rate.
Molloy is keeping her fingers crossed.
'If people don't buy tickets for this, it's going to take me a while to claw my way back from it. But I don't think 800 tickets is beyond the beyonds.'
The impact of public funding on Irish festivals deserves to be amplified, according to Angela Dorgan, chief executive of
First Music Contact
, the Arts Council-funded resource organisation for musicians.
'I know it's not very sexy to talk about it, but acts like
Fontaines DC
and
CMAT
had early tours supported by
Culture Ireland
,' she says, referring to the State promotion agency.
The 'tons' of background work going on includes Ireland Music Week, the First Music Contact-run October showcase that places up-and-coming Irish artists in front of international bookers. 'We're seeing a lot of Irish bands being booked for European festivals, which means they can tour,' she says.
Nothing can replace 'eyeball to eyeball' contact between artists and audiences, Dorgan believes, but she cautions that the ecosystem will unravel if it becomes unviable for musicians.
'There are festivals that pay security staff, sound engineers, everyone, but the fee for the artist is an afterthought. We need to keep an eye on the fairness of that. You can't sell tickets for an empty stage.'
With the flow of international superstar acts slowing down – 'really bad for Ireland,' says Murphy – the viability of Irish festivals is likely to become ever more intertwined with the general health of Irish music.
Making a profit from festivals remains a high-wire act.
'You need to be in and around a sell-out. In the whole of the music industry, from concerts to festivals, the margins are extremely tight. So you need to be at 90 per cent, 95 per cent,' says Rolfe of Pod, which was founded by the late promoter John Reynolds.
Not all major artists are chasing the biggest paydays.
'Some of them want to do something different, something curated, something with a little bit more soul. The economics change if there are fewer of those artists available.'
June sees the second outing for Pod and Aiken's 10,000-capacity
In the Meadows
, which will have Iggy Pop as its headliner and co-curator. The one-day festival – which, like Forbidden Fruit, takes over Royal Hospital Kilmainham – exemplifies some of the trends predicted to shape the future festival landscape. It's a city venue, it's 'not just about the headliner' and it targets a 'slightly older' audience.
'Brand identity is going to become more and more important over the next five to 10 years. Sticking headliners on a festival bill and saying, 'That's it,' isn't going to be enough,' says Aiken.
Beyond the music, minimum audience expectations for food and drink, wellness and accommodation have all increased even since the first All Together Now, in 2018, Rolfe says.
He thinks that Ireland's size has prevented festivals here from becoming too genre-specific, too specialised, and that this makes for more interesting events. Bringing together people from different backgrounds 'who are into completely different things' is part of the joy of festivals, he says.
'That's an important thing in the world at the moment.'
The business, as Murphy adds, is bigger than the sum of its revenues – and that's worth cherishing.