AIF UK Calling For Music Festival Tax Relief

As the 39th independent festival in the UK has canceled its 2025 edition, the country’s Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) has called on the UK government to grant music festivals a tax relief.

A reduction in tax burden would “mitigate closures and help support the recovery and growth of the festival sector,” AIF reasons, adding that such an initiative would be mirroring “other Creative Tax Reliefs, such as the highly successful Theatre Tax Relief and Orchestra Tax Reliefs.”

The AIF’s proposal would support “smaller festivals under 30,000 capacity with tax relief on eligible expenditure towards the creative and music elements that make up micro and small events,” according to a press release from the association.

The announcement comes as another UK festival had to cancel its 2025 edition: Homestead, a new 1,500-cap event launched last year in Somerset, England – home to Glastonbury – for people over 25.

As the organizers of the event wrote on their socials, “ticket sales haven’t hit the targets that we needed to be able to deliver the event that we promised you all,” and added “It would be foolish for us to carry on hoping that tickets would eventually pick up and as a new, small, independent event with no external backing, it’s a risk that we can’t shoulder.”

Homestead marks the 39th festival to fall so far this year. As AIF points out, “that figure is half the number of festivals that fell in 2024, and has been met almost a month ahead of 2025’s mid-point.”

It goes on to describe 2024 as “a devastating year for the UK’s festival, with a record 78 events falling throughout the course of the year – more than double the amount (36) that did so in 2023.

Combining the fallen festivals of 2023, 2024 and 2025 with the 96 events lost to Covid, the total number of UK festivals to have disappeared since 2019 is now 249.”

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AIF CEO John Rostron commented, “The cancellation of Homestead is indicative of the challenges facing the independent festival sector right now. All the ingredients are there for a wonderful new festival, but the pressure on events is making it too difficult to get over the line. Instead of welcoming 2,000 people to this new festival, we have yet another cancellation to add to the list. A Music Festival Tax Relief would have given Homestead the space it needed to get the gates open. Only Government intervention here will give promoters the opportunity to kickstart new events like this, mitigate closures, and help the many festivals on fallow years return. We submitted a proposal to Government this week and urge festivals to join us to help their voices be heard.”

The statement from Homestead’s promoters concludes, “We can’t be naive that starting something new, in one of the toughest times for festivals, was inherently risky. We also wanted the event to be delivered at a certain level of quality, one that we can’t now compromise on. Homestead’s ethos is something that we are both passionate about and we have to stay positive! There is an appetite for what we want to create, so leave that with us and maybe we can try again sometime.”

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