Since Covid, French festivals have been faced every year with soaring artists' fees when putting together their programming. So much so that certain events are forced to find alternatives in order to hope to survive.
The rise in artists' fees endangers festivals. While many musical events are beginning to announce their programming for 2025, certain Breton organizers denounce, in the newspaper Le Télégramme, the explosion in the amounts requested by artists to come and perform on their stages. An outbreak such that some festivals fear for their survival.
“We could no longer afford Orelsan or M. The big international artists, I’m not even talking to you about them,” regrets Carole Meyer, director of the Art Rock festival, in the columns of Le Télégramme.
“We have to rationalize projects”
But Breton festivals are not the only ones to suffer this increase. In Lyon, the Woodstower festival, which brought together nearly 30,000 spectators in 2024, is also suffering from this explosion in fees.
If the event was able to welcome renowned artists like Booba or Hamza last summer, the organizers had to make concessions in return, removing one of their stages and shortening the festival by one day.
“It's not really the vocation of the festival, but unfortunately we are a little obliged to rationalize the projects”, confides to BFMTV.com Maxime Noly, the director and programmer of the festival.
“At a time when we were more in defense of a plurality of programming with a very rich offering, many stages and artists of all categories, today we must do fewer stages, have fewer artists and try to just bet on the headliners if we want to survive,” he continues.
Same story with the Au Foin de la Rue festival, in Mayenne. “It’s becoming more and more complicated,” tells us Léa Bélangeon, general coordinator of the event. “Between before Covid and today, we had to increase the programming budget by around 75% while keeping the same number of spectators, but ultimately, mathematically, it doesn’t work.”
Especially since this festival, which welcomed more than 18,000 visitors in 2024, is held during the first weekend of July, i.e. during the biggest weekend of festivals in France. “We have enormous competition so it’s obviously very complicated to negotiate artistic fees,” confides Léa Bélangeon.
“Everyone charges the same prices”
According to Maxime Noly, this increase in artists' fees has existed for several years, but it intensified after the Covid pandemic, particularly for French artists, in order to compensate for losses linked to the shutdown of the industry. .
“With the crisis that we had just experienced, we hoped to return to more rational prices, but it rather had the opposite effect. There was the desire to make up for things that had not been able to be done during this period and earn fees to make up for it,” says Maxime Noly.
But since then, the phenomenon has only grown and now extends to “all categories of artists, not just the big ones”, assures the director. “The amounts have sometimes quadrupled in the space of a few months,” he assures.
“There are artists for whom we are suddenly asked for amounts of 15 or 20,000 euros when it is absolutely not justified. It's because the artist has a 'buzz' and will certainly no longer exist the following year so we have to take the money as soon as possible,” continues Maxime Noly.
This increase no longer only concerns international artists and now affects “all aesthetics”. “Electronic music, for a long time, was for example a market that was a little more affordable. Now everyone charges the same prices,” declares the director.
“A speculative bubble”
According to Maxime Noly, this surge in fees can be explained in particular by inflation. “Like everyone, artists are subject to increases in production costs on the rental of equipment, transport… So that contributes to part of the increase,” notes the director of the Woodstower festival.
But for Léa Bélangeon, this increase could however “easily be corrected” by artists and their teams by lowering some of their requirements. “In the years 2000-2010, when artists toured festivals, they knew that they could not offer exactly the same scenography as in a Zénith,” she explains.
“Today, most artists do not want to make this concession. They come to a festival with the same scenography and the same number of people as if they were renting the Zénith for an evening. So obviously that leads to enormous production costs which are reflected in the festivals”, continues Léa Bélangeon.
The other constraint is also competition between associative festivals like Woodstower or Au Foin de la Rue with other musical events financed by private producers like Lollapalooza, produced by Live Nation or Rock en Seine and Golden Coast, who can count on the support of the Combat Média group, belonging to investment banker Mathieu Pigasse.
“We are not quite on the same scale as a festival supported by Live Nation or by private producers. So when they are able to release amounts disconnected from economic realities, 100,000 or 150,000 euros, for an artist , that inevitably poses difficulties for us,” regrets Maxime Noly.
“We are in a speculative bubble. If these festivals continue to pay an artist at insane prices, why would his production lower the price of the fee? So from that moment on, they make supply and demand easily and we , independent, it's more complicated to find a place”, agrees Léa Bélangeon.
French festivals also have to deal with strong competition on an international scale. “International artists are less and less present on festival posters in France because internationally, the French market is less and less competitive compared to the rest of the world. Artists therefore sometimes choose not to not come to France”, laments Maxime Noly.
“It’s starting to move a little bit.”
To ensure their financial balance and survival, certain festivals try to pass on this increase in artists' fees by slightly increasing the price of their tickets each year. Although this does not seem to deter the programmers of big-budget events, other organizers nevertheless fear losing part of their audience in the long term by offering prices that are too high.
“We, who are an associative festival, our goal is to make culture accessible to the majority of people. But between the drop in public funding and the perpetual inflation of ticket prices, we risk going from having tickets to around 150 to 200 euros, even for an average festival”, assures Léa Bélangeon.
What remains for associative festivals is the bet on difference: a local program with emerging artists. “When other events offer artists who are very expensive, even if it means having tickets that reach crazy sums, we will rather think about keeping a program that allows us to charge accessible ticket prices. Above all, this is this will allow us to remain competitive in the years to come,” adds Léa Bélangeon.
According to Maxime Noly, certain actors in the field are however starting to become aware of the complex situation of festivals: “we had an extremely complicated summer with many festivals which are emerging very weakened, or even which will disappear and there are actors who are sensitive to that.”
“Some realize that they still need us to continue working and that we should perhaps think about lowering the prices of pills a little. This is not the case everywhere, but it is starting to move a little little,” he concludes.