SunFest has been in the red $1M per festival for years. Ticket prices have doubled. Why?
Palm Beach County’s biggest annual weekend event, SunFest, has lost millions of dollars and half its audience over the past seven years. At the same time, ticket prices for the multiday downtown West Palm Beach waterfront music festival have nearly doubled and days have been cut.
SunFest lost more than $1 million on each of its last three festivals, wiping out all gains it had made since the mid-2000s. To stop the financial bleeding, the festival this year, which starts Friday, shrank to three days, cut unprofitable longtime traditions and booked acts that are more popular than usual, organizers say.
The price of an advance one-day ticket without discounts has grown from $35 in 2017 to $70 this year. The cheapest five-day advance ticket in 2017 cost $75. This year, it was $130 for all three days.
“We have bent over backward and taken a lot of risks to keep prices as low as possible and hope that people will come out,” Executive Director Paul Jamieson said.
This year's festival starts Friday: SunFest 2023: Everything you need to know on lineup, schedule, tickets, parking, and weather
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SunFest attendance down by more than half since 2017
Attendance has plummeted from about 174,000 in 2017 to 85,000 in 2022, data provided by SunFest shows.
And SunFest’s $50 price hike this year for last-minute multiday tickets is the festival’s biggest since it started in 1982. A 2022 general admission ticket for all four days of SunFest cost $120 at the gate. A three-day ticket bought in person Friday will cost $170.
“I don’t think our ticket prices have remotely kept up with the cost of putting a festival on,” Jamieson said. “It’s part of being a nonprofit. … I certainly understand the knee-jerk reaction for people who say, ‘Look, the ticket prices are so high.’ Well, I’m sorry, everything used to be cheaper.”
SunFest festivals since 2016 cost more than $7 million each. Revenue has gone from a high of more than $7.7 million in 2017 to a 10-year low of $5.7 million in 2022, not counting a federal COVID relief grant of about $3.5 million that helped pay for last year’s festival.
The majority of spending in the past three festivals went to musical acts, its public tax filings show, from 35% in 2012 to 52% last year. SunFest has featured a range of acts in the past seven years such as Lil Wayne, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Blink-182, Weezer, Keith Urban and Nick Jonas. Contracts with the artists prevent SunFest from revealing how much they’re paid, Jamieson said.
Jamieson does not blame rising ticket prices, fewer days or SunFest’s offering of musical acts for its dwindling audience.
This West Palm Beach waterfront festival can't stand the rain
“Rain is the predominant theme,” he said. “Attendance in 2018 and 2019 was down significantly due to weather. In 2018, we had quite a bit of rain on Saturday and Sunday. Then in 2019 it rained every day. … We were affected by rain last year Thursday, Friday and Saturday.”
Downpours on Saturday can be especially devastating. It’s the day that brings in the most money.
Organizers talked in the past about moving the festivals to another time of year where it’s less likely to rain, Jamieson said. But a meteorologist they consulted with in 2019 said that global warming made it tougher to predict which times of year would be sunnier. “The meteorologist we talked to said, ‘It’s just luck,’ ” the longtime director said.
The annual music festival, which takes place in late April or early May, enjoyed a decade-long run of profitability and popularity from 2005 to 2015. The nonprofit event netted an average of about $271,000 yearly during that time for a total of about $3 million.
But since 2016 SunFest has lost more than $4.8 million.
Most of those losses came from 2018, 2019 and 2022.
Why SunFest musical acts can charge more
With more festivals popping up in the past decade, but the number of popular musical acts staying stable, artists can command higher rates, Jamieson said. ‘There’s always new musicians coming out, but by and large the pool of artists that will actually sell tickets stays relatively consistent,” he said.
Others in the events and festivals industry echo that sentiment.
“Outdoor music festivals are seeing a decline,” International Festivals & Events Association President Steven Schmader said.
“It used to be that there were a handful of festivals. You’d put them on your bucket list," Schmader said. Now, though, newer outdoor music festivals targeting niches are attracting audiences that used to go to the established ones.
“Anecdotally, I think their costs have gone way up,” Schmader added. Everyone is charging more, he said, including artists, vendors and security. The end of the worst of the COVID pandemic was followed by labor shortages for businesses involved in the industry, he said. That means higher wages and more competition, but also higher costs for festivals.
Other music festivals nearby gaining ground
He mentioned one instance he heard about where one food stand was hiring another’s workers at the festival itself.
While SunFest is the only event of its kind in Palm Beach County, other big ones with more popular artists and focused genres have been gaining steam in recent years in and around South Florida. These include Okeechobee Music Festival (about a 70-mile drive from downtown West Palm Beach), Tortuga Music Festival in Fort Lauderdale (51 miles) and ULTRA Music Festival in Miami (72 miles or an hour on Brightline). All of those are usually in March and April.
Okeechobee Music Festival attracted about 27,000 paying fans in 2022, Okeechobee County commissioners said last year. But it attracted about 15,000 to 17,000 daily this year, the county sheriff’s office said. ULTRA attendance in 2021 and 2022 remained around pre-pandemic levels of about 165,000.
“I think what happened in 2022 is we started to see that people were being more conservative with their money and there were a lot more opportunities for people to attend events and more people were doing more festivals,” said Florida Festivals and Events Association CEO Suzanna Neve, who is in charge SunFest’s corps of volunteers.
In 2021, as COVID vaccines immunized people, they were “revenge attending” public events after being cooped up during COVID, Neve said. And luckily for the festivals that went on that year, they had less competition than in 2022. SunFest was canceled in 2021.
No more art festival, 5K, fireworks at SunFest 2023
SunFest experienced attendance lows in 2022 not seen in more than a decade. So this year, along with raising ticket prices, festival organizers decided to cut back on events it hosted for years while narrowing its musical focus to regain financial footing.
So no more art festival, 5K race or Sunday night fireworks. People can go to art exhibits and festivals and run races in many places across South Florida, and there will be a July 4 fireworks show for people along the West Palm Beach waterfront, anyway, Jamieson said.
“We said, ‘Why don't we concentrate on the thing that we do that no one else does, which is bring national-level acts at an affordable price?’ ” Jamieson said.
Instead of booking 40 to 50 acts across three stages headlined by acts whose popularity peaked a decade or two ago, SunFest this year showcases 29 singers, bands and DJs with two stages, led by artists with recent hits. The new tactic is based on attendance figures for past acts and festivalgoers’ responses to SunFest surveys, Jamieson said.
Headliners and highlights from SunFest 2022 included acts such as Boyz II Men, Counting Crows, Slightly Stoopid, Adam Lambert, The Goo Goo Dolls, Melissa Etheridge and Nelly.
Headliners this year include rock band The Killers, rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, and electronic duo The Chainsmokers. It also includes reggae singer Ziggy Marley and rock band The Dropkick Murphys, who have played SunFest at least once in the past. But other headliners include rapper Flo Rida and rock band 311, who haven’t released albums since before COVID.
“The Chainsmokers are still relevant,” Jamieson said. “The Killers, are they a band of the 90s? Well they’re still selling tickets, according to the reports I’ve seen.”
“Jack Johnson, Ziggy? Timeless. What’s more SunFest than Ziggy on a Sunday afternoon? Dropkick Murphys? That’s an experience. You can’t just stream a show.”
SunFest is still a bargain, for attendees and the county's economy
Even at $170, SunFest is cheaper than most big festivals in Florida. Individual tickets to ULTRA cost $299.95 this year for all days. Tortuga’s price tag was $275. Okeechobee Music Fest’s cheapest tickets were $369.
Gasparilla Music Festival in Tampa, which took place this past weekend, cost $95. But, like SunFest, it’s run by a nonprofit and its musical acts are diverse. It also has lost money in recent years, but not as much as the West Palm Beach festival.
During the 12 months ending April 30, 2022, Gasparilla held two festivals, public tax records show. It brought in almost $4.4 million but spent almost $4.9 million.
Despite shrinking attendance, SunFest still provides a big boost to local businesses and the economy.
Occupancy rates for hotels in downtown West Palm Beach and around Palm Beach International Airport grew by about 11% between 2021, when SunFest wasn’t held, to 2022, according to Palm Beach County’s taxpayer-funded tourism marketing agency, Discover the Palm Beaches.
About 87% of hotel rooms in those areas were booked during SunFest 2022, agency analyst Gustav Weibull said. In 2021, it was 76%.
About 38% of SunFest attendees in 2022 came from outside Palm Beach County, Jamieson said. The festival provided $9.1 million in “economic impact” last year for the county, he said.
Discover the Palm Beaches did not comment on SunFest’s finances or the potential loss of its economic impact if it ends. West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James’ office did not respond to requests for comment, either.
“SunFest in our industry is highly respected,” said Schmader, the president of the International Festivals & Events Association. “If there’s anybody who is going to come up with the idea to save everybody, it’s going to be them.”
Chris Persaud is The Palm Beach Post's data reporter. Email him at cpersaud[at]pbpost.com. Click @ChrisMPersaud and follow him on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: SunFest in West Palm Beach: Festival deficits, ticket prices doubled
