One of Bluesfest’s former senior executives has offered an inside perspective on what went wrong as the fallout from the festival’s cancellation continues.
Jason Clair, who was the festival’s head of marketing from 2023-2025, has broken his silence in a new YouTube video, detailing his experience behind the scenes.
The festival, which was due to return from April 2nd-5th, was called off earlier this month, with organisers citing “rising production, logistics, insurance and touring costs, combined with softer ticket demand and international uncertainties” as key factors behind the decision.
In the weeks since, the situation has grown more complex. A liquidator was appointed to manage the festival’s financial affairs – including vendor payments and ticket refunds – but ticketholders have since called for further investigation after reports emerged that Bluesfest owes approximately $5.7 million to creditors. In correspondence from Worrells, the appointed liquidator, it was also indicated that refunds are “unlikely” to be issued.
PayPal – one of Bluesfest’s principal non-bank payment channels – has since said it would temporarily relax its refund policies to help some ticket holders get their money back.
Festival director Peter Noble, who was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his services to the industry in 2016, has gone to ground since the cancellation news. A recent investigation by The Australian uncovered decades of alleged mistreatment by Noble, including claims of repeated bullying and verbal abuse toward staff, disputes with performing artists over payment, and accusations of misleading the public after declaring Bluesfest would end in 2025 before successfully applying for more government grants for survival.
Through his lawyers, Noble denied the allegations for the most part, but was “adamant that he had not committed any misconduct” and said “the reporting would be unfair”.
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Clair has attempted to fill in the gaps, detailing how those tensions played out within the organisation. He described the cancellation as a “slow bleed”, not a “sudden collapse”, claiming Bluefest’s downfall was the result of compounding structural pressures. He pointed to a “multi-year deficit”, alongside a breakdown in trust and a pricing model that had become increasingly difficult to sustain in a shifting live music landscape.
“Bluesfest did not fail from one bad decision,” he said. “It failed because a multi-year deficit, a broken trust loop, and an unviable pricing model collided in a fragile live music economy. The margin for error was completely gone.”
He raised concerns about internal communication in the lead-up to the festival’s final chapter – which he claimed caused the “broken trust loop”. Clair said the 2026 announcement was made without clear or official direction internally, and that staff had been led to believe the 2025 edition would in fact be the festival’s last. Unlike Noble had previously suggested, Clair claimed messaging around the “final festival” in 2025 was not understood to be a strategic move to drive ticket sales – and was instead taken at face value.
“The team marketed it in that way because they believed it. I believed it, every person working on that campaign believed it,” he said. “Word filtered through to me that 2026 was happening, not through a team meeting, not through a structured briefing, but through informal channels. And the team’s instinct was immediate, ‘We need to tell people, we’re telling the public, right?’ The instruction to do that never came to me.
“I genuinely don’t know whether that was a deliberate decision or something that got lost in the complexity of running a large organisation. What I know is that the instruction never reached me, and the team never got direction to have that conversation with the audience. The 2026 announcement went out without context, and the audience, they noticed. Reddit threads, Facebook comments, people saying ‘I went last year because I thought it was the last one, now I don’t know what to believe, I’ll wait and see’.”
Clair said those words – “I’ll wait and see” – are “a death sentence” in festival economics, claiming that’s where the decline started. “The trust damage combined with the absence of clear communication when 2026 was announced hit pre-sales at the exact moment the festival needed.. the most. The decision not to address it, from my direct experience, is one of the reasons I left.”
Clair outlined the financial impact this had on staging a festival on Bluesfest’s scale, which he says commits $15-20 million before ticket sales are even factored in – covering artist fees, infrastructure, and production costs, among other things.
Within that, he said, was federal and state government funding. “Public money was in this operation,” he continued. “And this was not a sudden collapse. This is a slow bleed that reached its endpoint.”
While he did not detail specific working relationships – outside of admitting his relationship with Noble was “difficult” – Clair also alleged there were challenges at a leadership level. More broadly, he said recent reporting into Bluesfest’s internal culture, including The Australian‘s damning investigation, has been “consistent” with his own experience, though he did not elaborate further.
“I’ll leave it at that. I experienced it, you read it from other people, that’s what it is.”
Clair repeatedly returned to the people behind the festival – its staff, contractors, and volunteers – suggesting they had been let down in the process. “They deserved better,” he said. “And so did the audience. They deserved honesty.”
Several artists slated for the cancelled festival are pressing ahead with their Australian and New Zealand tours, offering fans a silver lining. Among those moving forward are Sublime, The Pogues, The Wailers, The Black Crowes, and Marcus King Band. The Wailers have reshuffled their itinerary, announcing new shows across NSW in place of their Bluesfest residency.
Split Enz’ forthcoming Australian tour – set for May – is also still going ahead, while The Living End have announced a one-off show in Brunswick. “Like all of you who had planned on going to Bluesfest, we were bummed out when it got cancelled. So, we thought stuff it, we wanna play a gig anyway so we are,” the band shared.
However, performances from Buddy Guy, Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band, Jerry Harrison & Adrian Belew, Erykah Badu, and Earth, Wind & Fire have all been scrapped, alongside select sideshows such as The Black Crowes’ planned Newcastle date.
Watch Clair’s YouTube video in full here.
Rolling Stone AU/NZ has contacted the Communications Lead for Bluesfest for comment.
