Smaller festivals are on the verge of collapse this season. Costs, ticket misery, Wolfram Weimer, reduced funding and much more. Is this the end of the indie community as we know it?
“Like many lovingly curated small and medium-sized festivals, the OBS is currently facing a whole series of challenges. Apart from the creeping devaluation of money, almost all costs related to festival production have risen sharply in recent years. In almost all areas, we are now calculating expenses that are up to 30% higher than in 2022.”
(Orange Blossom Festival, in a 2026 blog post)
“As we work on the schedule and prepare the structure, it becomes clear to us once again: times have changed, and the festival and our work on it must too. In 2027, the Immergut Festival will look different.”
(Immergut Festival via Instagram, May 2nd)
The annual uniqueness of festivals often obscures the problems behind the scenes. If you as a fan see that the major project was somehow pushed over the stage in the summer, it sometimes leaves your field of vision again. But we are in a decade in which one can no longer simply assume that all open air events will always be successful in the end. This year, for example, the Maifeld Derby is no longer taking place; it had to give up after 15 years. The situation is serious – the reasons for this are varied. I’ve collected them here so we’re all on the same page.
In trouble
Closely calculated
Many events that are not based on venture capital but rather on passion do not have large profit margins and laboriously generate what is needed every year for the infamous “black zero”. This means that there are rarely reserves in the background.
The damn cost
Rembert Stiewe from the Orange Blossom Festival already told us about it at the beginning, but he didn’t have to. Because everyone is feeling the current inflationary flash mob anyway. A bar of chocolate now costs two euros? Thank you Merkel! Okay, if it were just that, then bands could steal sugar cubes from the restaurant at the motorway service station instead of buying Snickers. But the sharply increased prices for logistics and fuel, for example, obviously affect the festivals directly.
The despondency
Advance sales have not only become more and more important for acts in recent years, they have long been a deciding factor in whether events are held. For many understandable reasons, the motivation of many visitors to commit to a festival long in advance by buying a ticket has noticeably decreased. The lack of planning security due to fewer tickets sold in advance is particularly affecting the makers of open airs these days. Because even if social and economic circumstances play a major role here, the lack of promises to visit is of course always related to you personally.
Polycrises
If you browse the news portals in 2026, you won’t want to buy festival tickets, but rather build a bunker and become a prepper.
The competition, the competition
The major organizers are increasingly signing exclusive contracts with artists. This means that an act that is booked for one of the big player events is not allowed to perform within a radius of hundreds of kilometers for months after and before. This functions under the martial term “territorial protection”. This makes many bands “unbookable” for smaller events in the summer.
And even more competition
A telling sentence for the outdoor live business in 2026 is the following: “The stadium acts eat the festivals’ lunch”. Stadium concerts take the butter out of festivals, that’s how I would translate it with my limited vocabulary. Mega events (like Taylor Swift or, most recently, Oasis) demand so much budget from fans that music fans have a lot of money available for small and medium-sized festivals.
The thing about the subsidies
The Orange Blossom disclosed in its post that it recently had more funds through federal funding that would no longer be granted in 2026. Of course, lovingly curated festivals are worthy of support, especially because they do not simply offer culture as commerce. But the current Minister of State for Culture, Wolfram Weimer, stands for a conservative culture war, and the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag is also trying to discredit and scandalize all possible alternative projects, especially when it comes to funding, with countless “small requests”. How dark things are now with culture and community can be seen in the following example: In 2022, the rapper Ikkimel received project funding from the Initiative Music – today the AfD Bundestag member Carolin Bachmann was able to use this to create a social media scandal for her clientele, the right-wing internet mob and beyond. Something like this in the metropolitan area is not without consequences for the culture of support in Germany.
The thing about subsidies II
The journalist Saskia Timm lays out in one article On the subject, the numbers are on the table: “According to the LiveMusic Commission, 575 applications were submitted to the funding fund for festivals in 2025, with a share of 94 percent from smaller festivals with fewer than 15,000 guests. Only 127 of them were approved.”
And now the weather forecast
So, finally a point that doesn’t drive you completely to despair. Weather has always existed – and is always a factor for outdoor events. Since the weather forecast for the current week is so bad, I’ll list it here. And above all to depict the meme that my colleague Vicky Hytrek made:
too great to die!
The further you scroll, the more Doom you see. But here in this column that’s supposed to be it. What follows is more of a reminder why indie festivals are still needed, why they are so worthy of love and protection.
Opportunities
Nowhere else is it so easy to come into contact with music from bands that you have only heard about through hearsay or that you haven’t even had on your radar yet. So there’s always a blazing opportunity in the field to fall in love with a new act Schock (is that how you spell it? Well, you know what I mean).
Exchange
But not everything just happens on the stage. At indie festivals, everyone is basically your friend (at least that’s how I see it) and it’s simply unavoidable that you keep getting to know people here through your shared passion for music. Collect everyone, add them up and take a selfie to be on the safe side. Maybe the (social media) world only belongs to Meta and other digital Hitlers, so you should have your bubble dry (or analog). It’s best to bring friendship books with you to the campsite. I’m serious!
transfer
Festivals require space, ideally nature and, if possible, no residents around them. Accordingly, many great open airs can also be found outside of the metropolises. When people make a pilgrimage to Jamel, Haldern or Neustrelitz, it also means something for the surrounding area. Beds are occupied, bread rolls are sold, taxi services are used. Festivals also give a boost to structurally weak regions.
Editorial recommendations
Utopia
For me personally the most crucial factor. Consequently, I’ll quote myself: “Festivals can be utopian places, offering you the chance to try out this different way of living together. Respectful, sustainable, exciting, hedonistic. Such meeting places are currently more important than ever, where the social climate is currently creating very real dystopian places.”
What now?
- Unfortunately, you can’t save the indie festival world yourself. But if you wait for the market to sort everything out, that’s exactly what happens. Because the market is a commercial creep that wants everything to revolve solely around money and shitty music. Swear!
- What festivals have you been to over the years? Please visit their social media sites at the moment. Leave likes, comments and maybe something will laugh at you so much that you’ll want to go there again.
- Buy the tickets in advance.
- And if you have tickets, post them in your stories, make a little buzz. Never forget: Wherever you are, there is the party. And that is especially true at an open air event.
- The rest is word of mouth, tell others about your plans. Because festivals also have the difficulty that their reach can only connect them with their own fans (and anyone who knows the ungracious algorithms knows that it’s often not even enough). You can reach other people, every tip helps – and if you’re enthusiastic about a festival anyway, then do it publicly.
- If you can, get solo tickets and if it still fits, get merch from the local bands or festival. Wear it with pride or give it as a gift with heart.
See you somewhere out there. Until then!
