Posted on Oct 25, 2021 in Festivals, Lists and Bests

Music festivals Australia 2022

Australian Music Festivals 2022

Over 400 Events

Welcome to the 2022 and FOURTH annual edition!

The exclamation used is for cheer, but a little forced. Obviously, the past two years have been an horrendous time for live music and, worst still, festival gatherings with plenty of punters communally enjoying the thrill of the same experience projected from stages around the country. Festival organisers, artists, stage and lighting crews, booking agents, managers, vendors, kindly volunteers and more have had to bear the brunt of uncertainty to work within constantly moving local COVID rules as the pandemic wreaks havoc.

This list of Australian events published on Listening Through The Lens has grown steadily and now, at the time of initial publication of this article, has hit the 400 mark. Not that a great proportion of these have actually taken place in 2020 or 2021. Most festivals beyond the global COVID outbreak in March 2020 have been thrown into disarray, not just because of hard-hit COVID host States (hello Victoria!) but also there has been such an interruption to interstate and overseas travel. The former due to uncertainty of COVID situations in Australia and the latter because our international borders have been closed throughout.

To illustrate, even though there were two-and-a-bit months COVID-free, over 20 per cent of all events did not even post 2021 dates with about half of those conceding at some point that their events were not proceeding. Other organisers tried to postpone until later in the year hoping for better times before doing the same thing. Plenty of events posted dates but did not proceed and a lot of them turned into virtual events only.

So how are we placed at the time of writing for 2022? As vaccination rates improve, it surely should be a better year for our much-loved live events. But, hard to know. A good number of festivals in this list have not been held since 2019. Whether that’s COVID-related (safety or financial or both) or other reasons, will be revealed in the fullness of time.

The first fly through of all these events has revealed less than twenty per cent of festivals have announced 2022 dates as of October 2021. But stay tuned here as we check sites regularly and update on this page. We plan to do that monthly.

If there’s a line through a date, that means that formal dates have at some stage been announced but organisers subsequently have had to cancel. If there’s a line through tba (to be announced), the event has been cancelled prior to any dates being published.

We started this list as we found it hard to find a single location that has a sufficient number and details of the many music festivals that take place in America each year.  We also like a simple list with relevant website links for easy connection, plus in some sort of intelligible order.

The genres we used initially were under the loose banner of ‘roots music’ but, as we have progressed, found any genre definitions to be overly restrictive and requiring the wisdom of Solomon.  So we have branched out into any event where music is showcased we could find.  Often most of these gatherings have a wide range of artists and styles anyway.  Let you, the reader, be the judge when you look at the line-up as to the level of attraction attending a specific event.

Any corrections or omissions, please drop a comment below or email us at team@listeningthroughthelens.com

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Music festivals Australia 2022