Recently, Derek Barbolla took it to socials and wrote what he called “probably the hardest post we’ve ever written.” To give you some context Barbolla is the founder of Cercle, the French company that spent a decade filming electronic music artists in extraordinary places, building one of the most distinctive and beloved brands in the culture.
Founded in 2016, Cercle built a name for itself by staging and streaming performances at venues of cultural, natural and/or artistic significance. From La Piedra del Peñol (The Rock of Guatapé) in Colombia to UNESCO World Heritage Sites like Abu Simbel, Egypt to the National Air and Space Museum of France. They have produced more than 200 shows and was executed by a team of 35 people. And now, serious financial difficulties, a cancelled Mexico festival, and a public appeal for fan support that nobody in the electronic music community saw coming.
“After COVID, costs and taxes kept rising, margins kept shrinking, and the weight of years of betting everything on what we believed in became too much to carry,” Barbolla wrote. “At some point, the balance we always managed to hold, just could not hold anymore.”
Cercle is not alone. Not even close.
The festival sector, once the golden goose of the live music industry, is undergoing what analysts are calling a “Great Correction”, less a market adjustment and more a cultural liquidation. The numbers bear that out with uncomfortable clarity. More than 100 festivals worldwide were cancelled in 2025, most of them in the US and UK. In the Netherlands alone, 50 festivals were cancelled that year. The UK festival industry tracked over 40 cancellations in both 2024 and 2025, with forecasters expecting the list to grow further in 2026.
Festivals That Said It Out Loud
The most instructive examples are the ones that went public with their difficulties. Burning Man, a nonprofit reported a $10.7 million net loss in 2024, on $57.5 million in revenue against $68.2 million in expenses. Ticket sales fell short of target for the first time in over a decade. Production costs rose sharply. Organisers cut staff, launched fundraising efforts, and adjusted their model for 2025. Like Cercle, Burning Man prioritises culture over commercial profit. That makes it acutely vulnerable when costs surge and attendance dips at the same time.
Envision Festival in Costa Rica offers a Global South parallel. A multi-day immersive festival near Uvita blending electronic music, yoga, art installations and permaculture, it draws an international crowd seeking participation over spectacle. Organisers postponed the 2025 edition. In their statement, they disclosed the festival “has not been a profitable festival for many years,” with cumulative losses exceeding profits by millions. The co-founder personally covered debts from prior years. Local pushback around noise and environmental concerns added further complications.
Across the electronic music world, the pattern repeats. Balaton Sound, Hungary’s largest electronic music festival announced in late 2025 it could not continue. “Over the past three years, we’ve done everything we could to keep the festival going despite the challenges,” organisers said. Creamfields cancelled two Asian editions in 2025, Hong Kong in March and Bangkok in December. Organisers said “we’ve done everything we could to keep the festival going despite the challenges.”
Why Independent Festivals Cannot Make Money Anymore
The reasons are structural, and they have been compounding since 2020.
The cost of running a festival has fundamentally changed
Essential infrastructure costs such as security, fencing, stages, insurance, have risen by 30 to 50% since 2019. This is not standard inflation. Steel, labour and insurance premiums have moved independently of the consumer price index. The production values that audiences now expect as standard have become a baseline cost that margins cannot absorb. Spreading those costs across a global operation is only possible if you are already operating at scale.
Artist fees no longer reflect the market
More artists are bypassing festivals for their own arena tours. They make more money and control the experience. Top names now command premium guarantees to recoup pandemic losses. The fees attached to festival slots have not adjusted to reflect a tighter market. Advance payments make this worse. Deposits of 50% or sometimes 100% are required months before an event takes place. A festival is often paying in full before a single ticket has been sold.
The early-bird model is broken
After multiple high-profile failures left ticket holders without refunds, fans now wait until the last minute to buy. Early ticket sales are not just marketing. They are the capital that funds artist deposits, site builds and production costs. When those sales disappear, so does the festival’s ability to operate.
Winner-takes-all has replaced spread spending
Fans who once attended multiple events a year now choose one. That one is almost always the safest, most recognisable name on the calendar. “Roll forward to 2024,” said Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify. “You go all in to see Taylor Swift and you don’t bother with the festival. We’re seeing stadium acts eating the festivals’ lunch.” The mid-tier festival, once the platform that broke new artists and defined taste has no space left in that equation.
Oversaturation has removed the case for individual events
Too many festivals share the same pool of headliners. When every major city has its own version of the same event, the case for attending any specific one becomes harder to make. In 2026, the market has bifurcated sharply. You either go massive or you go underground. There is no middle ground left.
The Ones Who Are Not Struggling
Here is the paradox at the centre of it all. While independent festivals are placing themselves into liquidation and writing heartfelt letters to their communities, the live music industry as a whole is booming. The money has not disappeared. It has concentrated.
Live Nation’s record years
Live Nation posted record-breaking total revenues of $25.2 billion in 2025, up 9% from the year before. Operating income reached $1.3 billion, up 52% from 2024. Sponsorship revenue alone generated $1.3 billion at a margin of 64%. The company’s most efficient division by a distance, fuelled by brand partnerships with Bang & Olufsen, Anheuser-Busch InBev and Santander Bank. Ticketmaster processed 346 million fee-bearing tickets in 2025, generating $3.1 billion in revenue. Every independent festival that uses Ticketmaster pays a portion of every ticket sold to the same company that is posting consecutive record profits while the sector around it struggles to survive.
The established mega-festival tier tells a similar story. Ultra Music Festival, EDC Las Vegas, Lollapalooza and Tomorrowland continue to thrive. Not because they have somehow escaped the same cost pressures, but because they can absorb those costs across global operations, command premium pricing through years of brand investment, and leverage robust sponsorship relationships that smaller events simply cannot access. Scale is the moat. Live Nation’s 2026 forward bookings are already up double-digits in North America, with over 80% of large venue shows confirmed.
The monopoly question
The Association of Independent Festivals has published data showing that Live Nation and affiliated companies control 66.4% of arena, stadium and outdoor concert tickets in the UK. The UK monopoly threshold is 25%. The market dominance position is 40%. In the United States, a 2026 federal jury found Live Nation maintained an illegal monopoly in ticketing for major venues, with approximately 86% market share in certain segments. The antitrust trial in a Manhattan courtroom is still ongoing.
Live Nation’s legal team has characterised the company as being in the business of bringing joy to people’s lives. The independent festivals going into liquidation might describe the relationship differently.
Who Actually Profits From Live Music?
The beneficiaries of the current structure are not hard to identify. Large promoters with vertically integrated operations capture revenue at every stage of the chain: promotion, venue ownership, ticketing fees, and sponsorship. Top-tier artists with the leverage to command guaranteed fees and backend deals are insulated from the risk that falls entirely on the promoter. Production companies, insurance providers, and platform infrastructure businesses — including ticketing — continue to grow regardless of whether any individual festival succeeds or fails. Ticket resellers capture the arbitrage between face value and secondary market prices that the primary ticketing monopoly creates.
The people who absorb the losses are the independent promoters, the festival founders who started with passion and a credit card, the 35-person team at Cercle who made the impossible work for a decade. And the communities, local economies, artists and audiences who depend on those events for something that a stadium tour or a streaming platform cannot replicate.
What Cercle Tells Us
Cercle is a particularly painful example because it represents exactly the kind of project the ecosystem needs to remain interesting. It started with €10,000 worth of GoPros, microphones and a mixer. They built a record label, a festival, and an archive of cinematic music experiences that nobody else had thought to create. They’ve run on passion. Cercle gave their content away for free on YouTube. They’ve done everything right. And it still ran out of runway.
The question Barbolla’s letter raises is whether the current ecosystem can structurally sustain independent, risk-taking projects that give the culture its vitality. Based on the evidence of the past two years, the answer looks uncomfortably like no. Costs flow upward to artists and production companies. Revenue concentrates at the infrastructure layer. The people in the middle absorb the risk without capturing the return.
The industry may need meaningful change. Smaller formats with lower overhead. Better cost-sharing between artists and promoters. Genuine policy action on ticketing monopolies. Direct fan-supported funding models that activate before a crisis rather than after it.
“What we built together cannot be undone and will stay with us forever,” Barbolla wrote. “We will keep you informed of the next steps and we are working hard to keep the dream on.”
That is the spirit that built the independent festival scene. Whether the economics will ever again allow it to survive is the question the industry has not yet answered.
If you want to support Cercle directly, you can do so here. Everything they have published will remain free on YouTube.
