Photo d’archives Woodstower © Brice ROBERT / Woodstower
Mined by capricious climatic conditions, the last edition of Woodstower mortgages the future of the festival which recorded between 300 and 350,000 euros in losses.
With the heat wave and the storms having subsided, it is time to take stock this week on the Woodstower side and the first financial results of this 24th edition plunge the festival management into uncertainty. “It’s not horrible, but we are well below what we expected”, says Maxime Noly, the director of the festival, while only 35,000 festival-goers came to Miribel-Jonage. Far from the 43,000 people welcomed a year ago.
“On the ticket office we recorded around 200,000 euros in losses and around 150,000 euros in losses on the bar and snack sales”
Maxime Noly, director of Woodstower
Read also: Confronted with the heat wave, Woodstower sails on sight
Between storm and heat wave, the festival not spared
Throughout this edition, the organizers will have had to deal with the vagaries of the weather. Postponing the opening of their doors and bars due to a heatwave red vigilance on Wednesday and Thursday, the organization was then forced by the prefecture to close its doors for 1h30 in the middle of the evening on Friday when violent storms were announced by Météo France. “There was finally some rain, not too many storms, but the damage was done since the public did not come at the last minute and some people who had places did not move“, regrets Maxime Noly. Combined, these climatic events have had the effect of a real blow on the festival which usually accounts for 30% of its ticket sales in its last week.
“It’s a big hole, especially since we were already in a financially not very favorable situation”
Maxime Noly, director of Woodstower
For an event with a budget of around 2,100,000 euros, the losses turn out to be massive. “We need to refine the figures a little, but we recorded around 300 to 350,000 euros in losses on this edition.“, blows the director who does not hide having “experienced without doubt the most trying edition in the history of Woodstower“. In a very concrete way, approximately 200,000 euros in losses were recorded on the ticket office and 150,000 euros on the bar and the snack bar, three posts which alone represent 85% of Woodstower’s budget. “Usually, bar receipts make it possible to compensate a little when you have disappointments at the ticket office.“, but this year the high temperatures, the torrential rains and the late opening of the bars have broken this line of life. The average basket of festival-goers at the bar has gone from €13.50 to €9.
Wintower threatened from its 2nd edition
What mortgage the future of the festival which must celebrate its quarter century in 2024 and that of its 10 employees, whose jobs find themselves threatened. These new financial difficulties are in fact added to those that the association has been experiencing for a year already, after “significant losses recorded“on Wintower in 2023, the winter edition of Woodstower organized for the first time last winter, and on Woodstower in 2022. These had been amortized thanks to the association’s own funds, “but there we no longer have the funds to deal with this deficit“, warns Maxime Noly who now hopes for support from the festival’s private and public partners.
Starting with the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region, whose withdrawal in the spring, to the tune of 40,000 euros, has largely contributed to the current fragility of the festival after 20 years at its side. “I asked the Region hoping that in our current situation it will reconsider its decision. We are in a rather exceptional situation, we are really talking about the sustainability of the association and the project. This would seem legitimate to me, I do not think that the role of a community is to make cultural associative projects disappear. I hope that we will be able to reopen a dialogue“, specifies the director of the festival. In the meantime, the head is already at the second edition of Wintower, in order to decide whether or not to maintain it, given the current state of things.
Read also: The Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region cuts funding for the Woodstower festival
2023-08-31 21:06:32
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