Jabberwocky Festival ticket holders left stunned as event is cancelled only 72 hours prior to start.
Summer and Fall are popular seasons for music festivals and this past year has been no exception. With so much competition for ticket sales and artists, it is no surprise that some festivals don’t have the outcome event organizers intended for.
With just 72 hours until the event start, event organizer All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) announced that London’s Jabberwocky Festival was cancelled due to poor ticket sales.
In a statement on their website, ATP wrote:
We have put everything into promoting Jabberwocky, and despite healthy ticket sales; all our efforts could not take those sales to the point that we needed to finally stage the event. Over the past month and all the way up until this moment we have tried every possible course of action to follow through in delivering Jabberwocky to you, but the position we unfortunately find ourselves in as a result of a succession of events that have lost money in an increasingly aggressive festival market, means we are no longer able to do so.
With some festival-goers and bands were already in or in-transit to London, many performers are scrambling to play other shows in the area to appease those who now no-longer have a festival to attend.
While the cancellation of the Jabberwocky Festival came as a surprise to ticketbuyers, those in the music industry were not surprised at the announcement due to both venue issues and financial problems ATP has faced leading up to the event. Jabberwocky was initially meant to be held at the Olympic Park in London, where ATP briefly sold tickets for it but then the event was re-announced at the ExCel Centre in Docklands in East London, a conference venue more known for dental industry conference showcases than concerts.
Despite this recent cancellation, ATP still has 10 concerts listed on its website, including a festival in Iceland next year, headlined by Belle & Sebastian. ATP stated all of the future festivals will go ahead as planned but will festival-goers trust the firm enough to buy tickets for the special events?
The company has already survived one liquidation with its reputation intact among music fans and bands, but at that time, few fans lost money. This time, some might.
While ATP has told fans who bought tickets from a company called Dash to contact it for a refund; Dash is telling people that ATP has their money. “We are very keen to learn where the money has gone!” Dash says in a statement on its Facebook page. It is considering legal action to get the money back.
Just one more example of a Special Event gone wrong…