Bluesfest’s collapse leaves many questions. These six demand immediate answers

When news broke last Friday that Bluesfest was cancelled, just weeks before its Easter weekend dates, it hit hard. This was much more than just another music festival biting the dust – it was one of the oldest (dating back to 1990, when it was known as the East Coast International Blues and Roots Music Festival), most successful (winner of multiple prizes) and biggest (selling more than 100,000 tickets over its four days in a good year).

Along with dismay and disappointment, the news sparked a lot of anger. Bluesfest supremo Peter Noble, awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his services to the industry in 2016, has since gone to ground.

He has also left a lot of people out of pocket, and many questions unanswered. Here are six of the most pressing.

Why can’t you refund ticket buyers?

In a March 13 email to creditors, including some (but not all) ticket purchasers, insolvency firm Worrells announced Jason Bettells, principal of its Gold Coast office, had been appointed liquidator of two Bluesfest-related companies. (Noble has 14 active companies with Bluesfest in the name, and another 14 on top of that, one of which, East Coast Blues and Music Festival, closely resembles the name by which the event was originally known.)

Ticket holders were told that “at this stage it seems unlikely that you will be refunded from the liquidation any money, but we will notify you if the position changes”.

Other event promoters who are members of Live Performance Australia consider it best practice to ensure customers are not out of pocket“in the case that the event does not proceed or … insolvency”.

Chief among those measures is that “all ticket proceeds must be deposited into a trust account … opened specifically for that purpose”, and that “the terms and conditions must make it clear that consumers will be entitled to a refund in the case that the event does not proceed”.

In other words, consumers should be able to buy tickets trusting that they will get their money back if a gig or festival falls over.

In principle, the promoter is only able to access the funds “after an event is held”.

So why have consumers been told they are “unlikely” to be refunded any money? Because Noble’s ticketing outfit Bluesfest Enterprises had already received the money, and because Moshtix was merely the ticket sales platform for the festival. (Moshtix is owned by Ticketmaster, which is part of Live Nation, which last year reported revenues of $US25.2 billion [$35.5. billion] globally, $US3.1 billion of it from ticketing.) As a subcontracted service provider, Moshtix accepts no responsibility for refunds.

“For this event, Bluesfest used its own merchant facility for payments, so payments were made directly to Bluesfest,” Moshtix said in a statement this week.

“Where this occurs, under our terms and conditions of sale, it is the obligation of the event organiser to provide refunds to ticket purchasers and not Moshtix.”

Moshtix claims this condition “was made clear to fans when purchasing tickets”. And indeed it was – assuming anyone even noticed or could make sense of the fine print beneath the check-out button.

“By choosing this payment method you are paying the Event Organiser directly, as they are the merchant for this payment for this type of event,” it read. “If a refund becomes payable … the Event Organiser (and not Moshtix) will be responsible for funding those refunds.”

Since Bluesfest’s cancellation, Noble has declined to answer any questions from this masthead – including the six key questions in this story.

The only solace for ticket holders is that those who bought them via credit card may be able to recoup the purchase via their bank.

How much money are we talking about here?

Bluesfest collapsed because not enough people bought tickets to make it financially viable to stage the event. But still, plenty of people did buy tickets – about 30,000 of them, according to a well-placed industry source not authorised to speak on the record. To break even, the source claims, Bluesfest would need to have sold 90,000 tickets (for last year’s event it sold 109,000).

That’s not 30,000 people, though. Each “ticket” represents a day’s attendance, but tickets were sold in a mix of one-, three- and four-day packages. The number of individuals who purchased was thus much less than 30,000; based on the previous year’s figures, it’s likely that about 10,000 individuals bought tickets of some sort.

There’s confusion about how much money that equates to. Noble claimed in his 510-page Report on Company Activities and Property, filed to ASIC last Thursday as two of his companies went into administration, that Bluesfest Enterprises (the ticketing arm) owed $23.41 million to 20,858 people, at an average debt of $1122.

On Wednesday, though, liquidator Jason Bettles, Gold Coast principal of insolvency firm Worrells, told The Australian that Noble had informed him he had the numbers wrong. According to Bettles, “they discovered that tickets sold only add up to about $5.9m”.

That would seem to support the 30,000 number. A one-day ticket to Bluesfest this year was priced at $257 for an adult. Three- and four-day passes averaged out at roughly $171 per day. Camping (roughly $80 per night) and car parking was in addition.

Of course, this is just the money for tickets, which were still being sold as late as March 12. Plenty of others are out of pocket, too, including stallholders, whose bookings were still being taken on March 11, according to festival sources. Then there’s the cost of accommodation, travel, merchandise, and lost work for crew.

Calculating the flow-on damage from the festival’s collapse so close to its staging is difficult, but Noble’s own previous accounting offers some clues.

When the festival was cancelled in 2020 because of COVID, Noble released figures that claimed “the loss … was estimated to be $116.9 million for the Northern Rivers and $203.6 million for NSW”.

Noble had for years commissioned reports on his festival’s economic impact. The most recent claimed the 2024 event cost $18 million to stage (including artists’ fees), with another $3.7 million spent on sideshow gigs (operated by Bluesfest Touring, which is still operating as of Friday). But the flow-on impact of the festival was reportedly far greater – $235 million in NSW, and $275 million nationwide.

Make of it what you will – many people inside the industry dismiss economic impact reports as worthless. But Noble has always taken the credit for the community’s gains. Following the festival being cancelled this year, he has not said a word about the community’s losses.

Do you have to pay back public money you received for the festival?

Precisely how much taxpayer money has been directed towards Bluesfest over the years is difficult to calculate because most of it has come through Destination NSW and its predecessor Events NSW, and is treated as commercial in confidence. Suffice it to say, though, that those economic impact statements Noble is so fond of have formed an important part of the justification for the contributions to his coffers.

While declining to provide a specific figure, Destination NSW issued the following statement in response to questions from this masthead.

“The NSW Government has a long history of supporting Bluesfest financially through Destination NSW, including the last five years, 2022 to 2026. Due to the highly competitive nature of major event acquisition, details of event investment agreements, including investment amounts and contractual terms are commercial-in-confidence.”

It has been widely reported that Bluesfest received $500,000 this year. Some reports claim state government support since 2021 amounts to $3.4 million. Well-placed sources suggest the event received funding from 2009 to 2012 and again from 2022 to 2026.

In July 2021 it also received $2.1 million from the RISE funding pool created by the Morrison government to help creative industries recover from COVID (Bluesfest was cancelled in 2020, and again in 2021).

Asked if his companies had any contractual obligation to repay any of the government money that had underpinned his operation for years, Noble declined to comment.

Was it a mistake to tell people 2025 would be the festival’s last year?

In August 2024, Peter Noble announced with much ado: “As much as it pains me to say this, it’s time to close this chapter. Next year’s festival [2025] will be happening … but it will be our last.”

A few months later, Noble told industry site IQ that the final curtain call was in response to a loss of financial support from the NSW government.

“What do we have to do?” he asked rhetorically. “Do we have to say it’s the last Bluesfest to get people to focus on us?”

In a long interview with this masthead that month, Noble denied that his announcement was a lie at the time, and denied that it was improper. He claimed the festival brought in about $100 million of revenue to the state and he was looking for “2-3 per cent of that” from the government by way of annual support. He also wanted $5 million to upgrade facilities on the site.

By claiming the 2025 festival would be the last, then relaunching it in 2026, he breached the trust that underpins the relationship between a promoter and audience. And it left a bitter taste in the mouths of many.

According to Mark Southcott, who attended Bluesfest with 14 mates last year, the mood when ads for 2026 popped up on-screen was hostile. “They were copping boos,” he said. “Out of our group, many of whom had been to multiple Bluesfests, all decided we didn’t want anything to do with it this year.”

Noble, he added, was “the organiser who cried wolf, and disrespected his customers”.

There was also grumbling when Noble added metalcore band Parkway Drive to this year’s line-up in January – so much so that he felt moved to issue a statement defending the move. “Great music belongs on great stages, regardless of labels,” he insisted. “Music is an open sky.”

To be fair, Parkway Drive are a Byron act who’ve made it big internationally. And besides, Bluesfest has long embraced a catholic approach to programming. Over the years, alongside the blues and roots stalwarts, headliners have included the likes of Iggy Pop, KC and the Sunshine Band, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, Kendrick Lamar, Madness, Kool and the Gang, Chic, Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil.

It’s a broad church. But in programming this year’s line-up, and after leading people to believe 2025 was the last, Noble seems to have misread the mood of his congregation.

Announcing the cancellation on the festival website on March 13, Noble blamed it on “rising production, logistics, insurance and touring costs, together with a more challenging environment for major live events”.

Is this really the last we have seen of Bluesfest?

Bluesfest is dead. Long live Bluesfest!

Corporate records show Peter Bruce Noble is a director of at least 28 companies, 14 of which have the word “Bluesfest” in the name. And while two of them lie in ruins – Bluesfest Byron Bay Pty Ltd, which “is responsible for the event”, and Bluesfest Enterprises Pty Ltd, which handled the ticketing for the event – the rest were, as of Friday, still registered.

That includes Bluesfest Touring, the company responsible for the festival’s sideshow gigs around Australia. It also includes Bluesfest Services, the company that handles the logistics of staging the event. There are another 14 companies, some of which – such as Events Stalls Pty Ltd – likely play a role in the flow of money and services.

Some of the artists who had been booked to play Bluesfest and a series of sideshows promoted by Bluesfest Touring are likely to still make it to Australia. The Pogues and The Wailers are still coming but Earth, Wind and Fire and Erykah Badu are among those who no longer are.

The artists will have been paid as much as half their fee upfront, from which they have to cover their own costs of travel to Australia, but some will no doubt have doubts about the viability of Noble’s operation to fulfil its obligations (including covering transport and accommodation) on the ground.

As of Thursday, many operators involved in the sideshows were still unclear about their status. Some venues had put ticket sales on hold, but others had not.

While the festival has collapsed, the Bluesfest name lives on … for now.

Will you donate your own money to pay the companies’ debts?

Peter Noble he is a very wealthy man.

He owns a mansion at Lennox Head, valued at $4.24 million in July 2024; a commercial property in Bangalow, now on the market for $3.75 million; and a luxury villa in Pererenan, near Canggu, in Bali, bought about 15 years ago and in which he spends a good chunk of each year (his wife, Dyah Pratama Kurniawidhi Noble, was born in Jakarta).

And, of course, he owns the 118 hectares of farmland on which the festival has been staged for years. He bought the land in two parcels, in 2007 and 2014, for about $2.72 million. Last July it was valued by Byron Shire Council for rates purposes at $7.14 million. If rezoned to allow residential development, it would be worth many times that amount.

Though he is the director of two companies that have been liquidated owing millions of dollars, Noble is not personally liable for any of those debts.

With research by Andrew Brooks

Do you know more about this story? Email kquinn@theage.com.au

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