The European Festival Report is the essential annual guide to the continent’s popular music festival industry, offering insights into current challenges, priorities for 2025, and developments in health, safety, and sustainability. Published by IQ Magazine in partnership with YOUROPE, the fourth edition tracks the sectors’ health through data on ticket sales, pricing, production costs, lineups, boycotts and audience behaviour. As festivals face significant pressures while remaining vital cultural events, the 2025 report provides timely and essential analysis.

The report features perspectives from over 220 festivals and includes key insights into how festivals are currently faring, along with an annual season review that highlights both successes and challenges across the sector. It presents practical examples of pioneering solutions in energy, travel, water, waste, and circularity from across the continent, a deep dive into how independent festivals are coping with rising costs and a crowded market, and an overview of the escalating weather risks, safety of events and the resilience strategies being adopted. 

It also explores how Europe’s festival culture shapes global trends in sustainability, accessibility, and artistic innovation, and examines the increasing political pressures festivals face and how organisers are defending artistic freedom and inclusivity. 

Key findings from this year’s survey:

  • 28% of established festivals report rising production costs as their most significant challenge – this has been the top challenge four years in a row since the launch of the survey.
  • Across all respondents, 33% of major festivals had been the target of some form of protest or call for a boycott.
  • Ticket prices increased again, with the average day ticket increasing by 4 – 11.1% depending on the size of the festival – the average ticket prices rose by 5.6% and the average ticket price for a whole event is €203.21.
  • For newer festivals, booking artists is the single biggest challenge cited by 31% of respondents. 
  • International visitors to festivals remains comparatively low. 80% of festivals draw less than 20% of their audience from outside their home country.

 

Promoters across Europe continue to report that the price of staging events – from infrastructure and labour to technical services – has increased faster than they can comfortably pass on to audiences. This is reflected in ticket prices, with rises broadly in line with European inflation, showing many festivals are using targeted micro-rises, cutting costs, or finding alternative revenue streams rather than increase the cost of attending their events.  

All festivals say their costs have increased significantly more than inflation, highlighting the huge pressure festival budgets are under at the moment.

Meanwhile, major festivals are far more likely to have faced calls for boycott in 2025 than medium or smaller festivals. 

“This pattern aligns with the broader trend of cultural activism increasingly targeting high-visibility, high-investment events,” says IQ’s James Drury. “Larger festivals sit at the intersection of global finance, political discourse, and mass audiences, making them more exposed to reputational campaigns, whether related to ownership structures, brand partners, environmental concerns, or geopolitical positions.”

Looking ahead, festival organisers anticipate a similar set of pressures shaping their 2026 seasons. Rising production costs remain the primary future worry, followed by artist booking and audience demand – almost identical to the concerns reported for 2025. It’s clear that these are now structural issues that festivals expect to contend with for the foreseeable future.

Holger Jan Schmidt, General Secretary YOUROPE – The European festival Association: “The European Festival Report has become an invaluable piece of festival culture – an unparalleled summary of an entire festival season. It was recently described to me by an EU-level contact as a ‘trademark publication.’ What more could we ask for? Thankfully, it’s the EU itself that allows us to produce this publication and offer it freely to readers around the world. This deep-dive into what our peers create during the year is an inspirational lighthouse project in the YOUROPE agenda every year. And we are lucky that with IQ we can cooperate with the best team we could imagine.”  

Read the full report here: https://www.iqmagazine.com/reports/european-festival-report-2025/

 

About YOUROPE
Since 1998, YOUROPE – The European Festival Association has evolved into the most important association for popular music festivals in Europe. As of January 2026, YOUROPE counts 133 festivals and associated organizations from 31 European countries among its members. The overall aim of the association is to strengthen and improve the European festival scene as a whole, and promoting arts and music while connecting different cultures.

In its working groups YOUROPE focuses on different topics at the heart of festivals: sustainability, climate action and environmental protection in the GO Group (Green Operations Europe) and security and crowded spaces management in the YOUROPE Event Safety (YES) Group and diversity, equity, inclusion, mental health and more in the WIRE Group (Wellbeing, Inclusion, Responsibility, Equity).

Further, YOUROPE hosts the biannual European Festival Conference (EFC) and organizes the annual European Festival Awards (EFAs).


About IQ
IQ is the leading information resource for the international live music business.

IQ operates across multiple platforms including IQmagazine.com, the daily Index newsletter, IQ Magazine and a number of annual reports, including the International Ticketing Report, Global Arena Guide & European Festival Report.

IQ has a monthly reach of over 90,000 highly-engaged professionals working in the global concert and festival businesses. 

Contact
Nikki McNeill | Global Publicity nikki@globalpublicity.co.uk