SAN DIEGO — This week’s return of San Diego’s Wonderfront Music & Arts Festival, after a one-year hiatus, comes at a time when the live-music industry is swirling with pressing questions.

Have music festivals peaked? As production costs soar ever higher, are there too many festivals competing for the same acts? Are there too few superstar headliners to guarantee success in the face of potential bankruptcy?

“Fans only have so much money, and they won’t go to every festival,” said Dave Shapiro, the co-founder of the San Diego-based Sound Talent Group. Its roster of artists includes Hanson, Vanessa Carlton, Steve Vai and Jefferson Starship.

“Competition is healthy,” Shapiro continued. “But it also comes to a point where it becomes unhealthy. And there is a lot of competition, especially in Southern California,”

That being the case, is the bumpy run for festivals this year — including last month’s under-attended Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio — simply a course correction in a marketplace that still sees festivals taking place here, there and nearly everywhere?

Or are these anomalies in an industry that, in 2023, saw the top eight festivals worldwide — including Outside Lands in San Francisco and Hard Summer in Los Angeles — generate a combined gross revenue of $192 million? (In 2017, the last year Coachella reported its gross earnings, the six-day, two-weekend festival brought in a staggering $114 million.)

Of course, launching and sustaining multi-day music festivals has never been easy — or inexpensive. But the landscape for such events has never seemed as perilous or challenging as now, in part because of inflation, supply chain issues, skyrocketing tour costs and ever-higher ticket prices.

How perilous?

Last month, Coachella — the largest and most lucrative annual music festival in the world — for the second consecutive year failed to sell out its second three-day weekend.

Coachella’s first weekend — headlined, like the second weekend, by Lana del Rey, Doja Cat and Tyler, The Creator — was sold out. But the first weekend seemed less crowded than the usual 125,000 daily attendance of previous years, when both Coachella weekends would routinely sell out months before any performers had been announced. (Twenty percent of the festival’s ticket-buyers each year are from San Diego County, according to Coachella’s producers, who track sales by zip codes.)

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