What Does it Take to Really Run a Music Festival?

Welcome to Nowhere characterises itself as a cornucopia of grassroots music, arts, and poetry, with camping on site and a family-friendly vibe… for the right kind of family. Think rolling out of your tent, heading straight to the river for a dip and a spliff, and blissfully stage-hopping until you call it quits at 4am. 

It’s one of the various smaller-scale homegrown festivals that have sprung up in the last ten years to counter New Zealand’s big guns, like Rhythm and Vines and the long-deceased Big Day Out. The focus has shifted from just getting slaughtered in the scorching heat and pissing on tents (or setting them alight). These more intimate and close-to-home festivals are about community and creativity. 

When you’re wandering through a field, buzzing off your tits on any combination of contentment and narcotics, you’re rarely wondering how much it costs to bring in 20 portaloos, or who is cleaning up after the more careless attendees. There’s a lot to go into making an event of this complexity work, even a smaller-scale festival like Welcome. And the amount of labour and money it takes might be what’s stopping Aotearoa from seeing more thriving festivals. 

After seven years, 2024’s Welcome to Nowhere is the last. And it’s not the only festival coming to an end in the country: 121, Tora Bombora, Beacon Festival, Purple Paddocks. A growing wave of NZ festivals have fallen victim to indistinct hiatus or official shutdowns in the last couple of years. 

But people are (or were) going to these events. So why are so many of Aotearoa’s best independent festivals closing their gates? 

VICE NZ spoke to Welcome to Nowhere’s co-curator (“a made up title that sounds important for grant applications”) Joel Cosgrove to find out what really goes into running a festival, and why small NZ festivals are struggling to stay afloat. 

Welcome to Nowhere was founded by The Eyegum Music Collective, a Poneke-based collective of music enthusiasts responsible for bringing an eclectic curation of local music every Wednesday to San Fran, one of Wellington’s longest running venues. The collective has its origins in hosting house parties in 2013, during what they describe as  “the Pōneke music venue drought.” 

Coming off the back of some of the smaller indie music festivals like Chronophonium and Camp A Low Hum (which is making its return in 2024), Welcome to Nowhere started in 2017 as Gathering in The Forest. 

The first official Welcome to Nowhere saw 250-300 punters and 200 crew and artists. These days, Welcome is a small-scale but fully fleshed out festival, with around 1000 attendees each February – held each year in an under-wraps location somewhere-near-Whanganui. 

To lock in the location, Eyegum leant on pre-existing connections to a local poet, who lived on farmland halfway between Whanganui and Hunterville. They got in touch, explained the plan and asked to view it. The location was locked in and Eyegum began looking into logistics. 

“90% of the festival is defined by the environment that you're in,” said Cosgrove.  

“It’s figuring out how the site works, where people work, where people walk, how it's situated, the amenities. All of those things.” 

The full cost of using the farmland isn’t publicly disclosed, but Cosgrove explained that in their first year of Welcome after the money was stolen by an intermediary, the land was paid for with an AEG drill kit. The general cost is “relatively small for us,” he said.

While the land might be a great deal on account of goodwill, the festival costs sky-rocket once you add staging, artists, portaloos, food trucks and safety measures. 

The total cost of running Welcome can rise as high as $200,000, or $135,000 in a good year, which is the ideal number to break even. But breaking even is no easy feat. Most years, there are heavy losses on the financial side. 

“The only time we've actually made money is the year that it got cancelled and we got COVID grants,” said Cosgrove. “Every other year [there are] between $75 and about $35,000 in losses.” 

And where does that $200,000 even come from in the first place? 

“We don't make money, the money just goes into whatever we're doing next,” said Cosgrove. “So Eyegum, it doesn't make a profit, per se. I think it's ‘retained earnings’ as corporate terminology.”

There’s also funding from the likes of Creative New Zealand (CNZ), the NZ government's official art’s council, which Cosgrove explained makes a “massive difference.” 

“So much of the success is: have we gotten a CNZ grant this year? The funding is so useful and so effective in promoting and strengthening cultural development within Aotearoa.” 

With all the potential financial losses well understood by the Eyegum team, the question has to be asked: why do it?  

“Because we’re stupid,” said Cosgrove. 

But it’s more than blind idiocy.

Aotearoa’s nightlife isn’t exactly known to buzz, or even humm, and this leaves many people struggling to find an outlet. Cosgrove said this is one of the reasons it’s so important to keep events like Welcome going. “You just can't go to a pub or a techno bar for 24-48 hours like you can in Berlin,” he said.

Gigs are always happening if you know where to look, and many incredible artists and collectives push to bring the scene to life, but Aotearoa has found itself significantly lacking staple venues and events – and festivals give people a place to live out their pent up dreams. 

But despite it being an outlet, the event remains a fairly relaxed environment.

“What we've got is pretty chill and wholesome,” said Cosgrove, “The cops stopped coming a couple of years ago because it just wasn't worth their time to pop in and have a look.” 

Well-laid expectations of the organisers, along the lines of care and consent, have prevented things from getting out of control – as well as the attendance of drug testing organisation Know Your Stuff, who was present at Welcome before their operation was even made legal. So while punters might be bumping ketamine till the wee hours and starting the day kissing a bottle of Midori, everyone collectively seems to buy into the idea that this isn’t the type of festival you come to just to forget. 

Volunteers make up about 80-100 of the attendees. Cosgrove explained that “their volunteering time is divided up by about 30 bucks per hour off the price of a ticket. Normally treated as between six and eight hours of work.”

Cosgrove acknowledged that “tickets to festivals are expensive as hell,” so the option to volunteer is an accessibility element too. 

And as for the organisers themselves? Being paid for their time is the first thing to be cut when figuring out costs. 

Welcome showcases many incredible artists, musicians and poets and, while they have no official parameters set on who they book, Eyegum makes sure it doesn’t set the stage for a monotonous experience. Perhaps surprisingly, the line-up doesn’t seem to affect the public reception of the festival.

“What we've noticed is that artists don't really drive ticket sales. I remember the year that we got Ty Segal, we sold about 550 tickets in the first week, and then the day that Ty Segal was announced, [we sold] about 16 tickets that day.”

“That's actually kind of liberating, in a sense, because from there you can just be like, who do we want to book?” said Cosgrove. 

When it comes to finding the artists it’s about a 50/50 mix of people who apply and people that are approached by Eyegum – from up-and-coming bands to talented friends to the big leagues. 

Paying the artists takes a decent chunk out of the net cost and is tailored to each performer.

“We've framed the payments broadly around the cost of getting there [Whanganui]. So a four piece from Dunedin gets more money from us than a four piece from Wellington… In some years performers were paid in profit shares… Then you'll have bands with booking agents where you negotiate a fee… It's incredibly subjective,” said Cosgrove. 

Ultimately a lot of good faith goes into the line-up, as Cosgrove stressed “no one's really making money,” – the key is making sure that it's not particularly ruinous to attend for the artists involved. 

So why, after seven years, is Welcome calling it quits? Along with some core Eyegum members taking flight to Europe, in large part it sadly comes down – surprise, surprise – to money. Rolling from year to year without a profit is something you can only do for so long. 

And Welcome is far from the only festival dealing with this strain.

“[This year] I know one festival lost $400,000 and another two festivals lost about $150,000. Another lost about $80,000. So there was like a bit of a bloodbath last festival season,” said Cosgrove. 

It’s not exactly a lucrative business.

Welcome to Nowhere arose in the Aotearoa festival scene as events like Chronophonium were winding down and the Eyegum team found themselves looking for an alternative to take its place. Perhaps, something will come out of the space left by Welcome. 

Welcome to Nowhere might be coming to an official end, but there’s a twinkle in the eye of dedicated festival lovers that might just keep hope afloat. 

“Everything costs money, but where there's a will, there's a way,” said Cosgrove.  

“At its core, people want to do this shit. Why do we keep doing it? Well, because, it’s amazing. Some of the best times in my life have been spent at our festival.” 

Rachel Barker is a writer / producer at VICE NZ in Aotearoa. You can find her @rachellydiab on IG and Letterboxd and see her film criticism on Youtube.