Edmonton Blues Festival 2025 has been cancelled due to financial struggles

The Edmonton Blues Fest 2025 has been cancelled due to rising production costs. The founder and organizer of the festival is hoping to return in 2026.

The Klondike Park was the most recent home for the Edmonton Blues Festival. However, after being forced to change venues and facing financial struggles, the founder of the festival has decided to cancel the event for next year.

“Very sad that there would be no festival in 2025, many of them said it was the highlight of their summer,” said Cam Hayden Edmonton Blues Festival Founder.

According to Cam, the cost of producing the festival has gone up significantly since after the pandemic and added that they still do not want to increase the ticket prices.

“It’s not practical to raise ticket prices to cover those costs, it really doesn’t have the tolerance or budget for that because the patrons are dealing with the same inflationary pressures that the festival is,” said Hayden.

The festival’s typical budget is estimated at 400 thousand dollars but according to Cam, it has increased by 50 percent since 2022.

“Well I feel sad because it was a nice compliment to Edmonton to pressure off us, bringing in a lot of Blues, it was an award-winning festival,” said Terry Wickham, producer of Edmonton Folk Festival.

Music festivals are not the only ones that experienced financial struggles, just this March, the Edmonton Fringe Festival launched the ‘Sustain Fringe’ campaign aims to reach the 300 thousand dollar goal to cover the production costs. And in Alberta Ave with the Kaleido Arts Festival, they launched a fundraiser to reach the 50 thousand dollar goal and inflation is a big factor to them.

“We’re not alone in calling a halt or a pause, the Vancouver Island music festival called on their pause about a month ago, they’ve been going for 30 years” said Hayden.

“Coming out of the pandemic, as bad as it is in normal life, it’s much higher than in entertainment as you can see from the cost of the tickets these days,” said Wickham.

The closure of Hawrelak Park due to its rehabilitation project affected the festival as well.

“And the festival is made up of two things, what you do and where you do it. If you don’t get both of those rights, it’s not going to work,” said Wickham.

Cam says more than 200 artists applied to participate in the festival every year with 15 of those being chosen to perform. He hopes that the festival will return in 2026.

“Our plan and hope is that the Heritage Amphitheatre will be available for us. In addition to that, we have to figure out the way to reset our budgeting process, our ticketing process so that the festival is actually sustainable,” said Hayden.