No Big Day Out and why AJ Maddah ruins everything
- genevavalek
- Jun 25, 2014
- 2 min read
Sadly, Big Day Out 2015 will not be going ahead, but hopefully it's not the end. All this drama started with AJ Maddah pulling his stake in the festival (fun fact, AJ's real name is Arash according to our m8s Project U) until American company, C3 confirmed that beloved Aussie show won't be going ahead. "C3 Presents is proud to own Big Day Out, one of the most iconic and established festival brands in the world. While we intend to bring back the festival in future years, we can confirm there will not be a Big Day Out in 2015," they said in a statement to Fairfax media.
According to Fairfax an anonymous person also stated that AJ Maddah failed to pay his share of the debts.
The promoter of the NZ BDO leg, Campbell Smith told the New Zealand Herald that he's confident BDO will be back in 2016 after missing a year, "You need to look at it the same way as we did in 2012. It was not great and we decided we weren't going to do it again and we brought it back a year later. I think it was really embraced but the same thing didn't happen in Australia."
AJ will be speaking on Triple J's Hack programme this afternoon, and if he's as generous with his information as he normally is, we're bound to get a good earful of goss.
Maddah may have been crowned the most powerful person in the music industry and I guess you could say he's respected in the industry, lets take a minute to have a look at few of his ventures with festivals.
Soundwave has been going for 10 years and is one of the strongest festivals in the country, which could very well be attributed to the strength and passion of the Soundwave genre's fans.
Soundwave Revolution had half the line up announced before being canned.
Soundwave Counter-Revolution mini fest was successful for the one year it was around.
Harvest was around for 2 years before being canned.
Warped was around for one year before being canned.
Big Day Out only lasted a year before being canned.
The average life of a festival that AJ is involved with is 2.5 years, and the lifespan of a festival announced by AJ in the last decade is 1 year. Of the 7 line ups AJ has decided will make money and announced for non-soundwave festivals, 29% have been cancelled after the line up has been announced because people aren't buying enough tickets.
Now I guess you could say it's a matter of bad luck, I guess you could say it's timing and that these things happens, but it looks like there's a bit of a pattern emerging. AJ Maddah may be leading the industry but is his runny mouth and brash behaviour really all that tolerable?
It's not all doom and gloom, hopefully Big Day Out will be back in 2016 but in the mean time lets froth over the sorta-maybe-possibility that C3 could bring Lollapalooza to Australia?
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By Geneva Valek with contributions by Matthew Turner
Photo by Geneva Valek
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