Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Festival axed: Beachdown goes down

Brighton's Beachdown Festival has been pulled.

Organisers have statemented:

“It is with immense personal regret that the Directors of Beachdown Festival have been advised that they must announce that due to slower than forecast ticket-sales and lack of support at a critical time from our bank and certain suppliers that despite being so so close to being able to deliver Beachdown Festival we are unable to do so.

“Very simply we were unable to meet the demands that the current economic climate put against us and at the eleventh hour despite having most of the infrastructure in place we have been forced to cancel the event.

“We wish to say at this time how desperately sorry we are to all those who have bought tickets or were participating in the event and to say that we all here are personally shattered expecially [sic] after eleven months of battling against the recession to try and put this event on and coming so close.

“We also wish to advise everyone that we explored every possible avenue to finance the event including re-mortgaging our houses to combat the unwillingness of banks to support us.

“We will do everything in our power to give the best information that we can via the web-site and via email but we ask that people understand that we will also be inundated with enquiries but we will endeavour to communicate to everyone as best we can.

“We ask all ticket-holders to get information from the outlet that you purchased the ticket from in the first instance and once again we will do everything we can to get as much information as we can to everyone as quickly as we can.”

Beachdown, which was due to feature Grace Jones and the Super Furry Animals was due to have taken place at Devils Dyke.


2 comments:

Justin Rolfe said...

Tragic. We were 10 people planning to buy tickets, but we were really put off by:

1. On their homepage, they said "tickets are sold out in Brighton venues" and forced people to ticket master. We assumed that meant that they'd be hard to get, and were hedging for luck.
Beachdown should not have put that message out

2. I don't know how bad their finances were, but they should have allowed some measure of interest; for example, we'd have expressed interest if there was a way to do so, and that level of interest might have been enough to tip a balance.
Who knows how bad the sales were, but some visibility into on-the-door sales would have been valuable to them.

Speaking personally, I used to be someone who would get organised weeks or months in advance of any event. Now I'm the sort of guy who organises myself 1-2 days before. I'm sure I'm represenative of a trend where advance ticket sales are decreasingly a measure of success.

How bad could it have been that the bank would rather lose the existing investment than attempt to recoup some costs? Must've been bad.

My heart goes out to the organisers.

Unknown said...

The sampler is a separate release that the label is giving as a free download.......


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Jenifer
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