Running a festival is an extremely hard and monumental feat to pull off successfully, and the Karoondinha Festival organizers learned that the hard way. Just under a month before the festival was set to take place they've cancelled the event. Fans were going to have the chance to see artists like John Legend, Chance The Rapper, Odesza, Paramore and others.
Hoping for a turn-out of over 30,000 people the organizers admit ticket sales didn't even get close to their desired number and so they're going to have to reschedule. “The event as planned will not take place July 21-31, 2017,” founder Paul Rallis tells Billboard. “We’re looking at other options at this moment and hope we can make something happen in some way. We’re not walking away from the vision of the idea in any way, because our commitment is still to make something great happen in this area -- it’s just not going to take place on the scheduled days.”
"I think what we've learned in all of this is that the key part of putting on a successful festival is having a sustainable business model, which we obviously didn't have going into this," he added. "The way this was structured in terms of its scale and projections was not sustainable."
Currently there's a huge over-saturation in the market of festivals and despite being able to snag some big-ticket performers, that never guarantees you being able to bring in attendees to make it successful.
