Australian Music Festivals 2023

Posted on Nov 15, 2022 in Festivals, Lists and Bests

Music festivals Australia 2023

Australian Music Festivals 2023

500 Events

Welcome to the 2023 and FIFTH annual edition!

We slowly but surely emerge from the shadow of the pandemic.

It has been a ghastly period 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, kind volunteers and more have had to bear the brunt of uncertainty to work within constantly moving local COVID rules as the pandemic wreaked havoc.

This list of Australian events published on Listening Through The Lens has grown steadily and now, at the time of the initial publication of this article, has hit the 500 mark. Not that a great proportion of these actually took place between 2020 and 2022. All 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 because there has been such an interruption to interstate and overseas travel. The former is due to the uncertainty of COVID situations in Australia and the latter because our international borders have been closed for a sizable time.

So how are we placed in 2023 at the time of writing? Case numbers remain quite high but rules have been relaxed and normal business has been resumed. Will attendance get back to pre-pandemic levels? Have festivals been able to survive the lean years with no income? 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 (burrowing into every site to see the current status – if there is any!) has revealed about 28 per cent of festivals have announced 2023 dates. But stay tuned here as we check sites regularly and update this page. We plan to re-publish this list 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.
• If there’s a line through 2023, there’s been an announcement that the event will not be happening this year.

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 Australia 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 require the wisdom of Solomon.  So we have branched out into any event we could find where music is showcased.  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

USA FESTIVALS 2023

This list updated on 14 March 2023

Music festivals Australia 2023

Music festivals Australia 2023

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Music festivals Australia 2023

Music festivals Australia 2023

Music festivals Australia 2023