Christopher BarrettThe Cambridge Folk Festival, which has been cancelled this year, lost £320,000 in 2024, according to its organisers Cambridge City Council.
Council documents show that prior to the Covid-19 pandemic the festival returned an average profit of more than £200,000 to fund free community events in Cambridge.
The documents, published prior to a scrutiny meeting today that will examine the reasons for cancelling this year’s edition of the festival, outline that the Council has earmarked £75,000 to deliver an alternative programme of folk-related events this year, ahead of the full festival’s return in 2026.
On cancelling the 2025 edition of the event, the Council said in January that it wanted to explore new opportunities. The 14,000-capacity event, founded in 1965, usually takes place over four days at Cherry Hinton Hall. Among the many acts to have performed there are Robert Plant, Joan Baez, Nick Cave, Suzanne Vega, James Taylor and Van Morrison. The 2025 edition would have marked the festival’s 60th anniversary.
The Council said that holding the festival in Cambridge provides an indirect economic benefit of approximately £2.3m per annum, and that while revenue from the festival previously funded free cultural events in Cambridge, the financial losses threaten that support.
The document show that the number of full-festival tickets purchased has declined considerably in recent years, from a pre-Covid average of 7,300 per year to a post-Covid average of 5,900.
A number of key challenges are cited in the documents, including increased production costs and competition from major operators such as Live Nation and AEG.