Festival Fever 2025
Laneway Festival takes top spot in ranking of the top 20 Aussie music bonanzas
It’s official, Australia is getting its groove back and its dancing shoes on.
It is estimated that, over the course of a year in Australia, 3.4% of all domestic visitors staying overnight are attending a festival. In other words, there are 4,000,000 people who travel across the country per year specifically to go to festivals.
So, with such a huge demand, it is likely that potential festival-goers will need to figure out which festivals are the best ones to visit and which are right for them.
And, thanks to research from Joe Fortune, the Australian Festival Index has ranked each of the country’s top 20.
The Australian Festival Index ranks events based on five different criteria, including value, access and scale to give an answer as to which festival tops the lot and offers the best experience for Aussie revellers.
Each festival is given a standardised score out of 20 in each of the five respective categories, which are then added together to give a total index score out of 100. A higher score denotes a better festival.
Leading the way with a score of 75.6 is Laneway Festival. The single-day music extravaganza has been held across nine different cities in its various iterations and will make an appearance in the Gold Coast, Sydney, Auckland, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth in 2026 with Chappell Roan headlining.
Coming in second place is Spilt Milk, which is another one-day festival across multiple cities – Gold Coast, Perth, Canberra and Ballarat. The 2025 lineup has Kendrick Lamar and Doechii at the top of the bill, while the festival itself netted an index score of 65.8.
Rounding off the top three is Listen Out, with its score of 59.4 calculated based on its most recent edition in 2024. Brisbane-based Good Things Festival, meanwhile, agonisingly misses out on a spot in the top three with a score of 59.3. Heading up the bill in Brisbane in 2025 are American rock band Tool.
How it works
- The aim of the Australian Festival Index is to rank each of the biggest festivals against one another, to find out which one scores the best across five categories.
- Included within the index are 20 of the biggest festivals from across Australia, representing a broad range of different demographics and musical genres.
- Each festival is ranked based on five different criteria, which were each given a standardised score out of 20 to give a total maximum index score of 100.
- Those criteria were:
– Scale: The first category ranks each festival based on how big it is, both in terms of actual size and reach. Each festival is ranked based on capacity and social following here, with the bigger numbers meaning a higher score.
– Value: Simply, this is looking at how much bang festival-goers get for their buck at each event. This category looks at ticket price and the number of days the festival lasts for.
– Weather: Nobody likes going to a festival in the cold and rain, so this looks at the average conditions in each location based on the time of year the festival is held. Specifically, the category looks at average mean temperature and precipitation.
– Access: Famously, not all of Australia is the easiest to get to. This criteria ranks the festivals based on their remoteness, or lack of, and the reliability of their access or, in other words, how easy they would be to reach in all circumstances.
– Representation: Finally, this criteria looks at gender representation in the most recent lineups of each festival, giving a higher score for better representation of females at the top of their bill.
- Each festival is then ranked based on the scores within each criteria to give the aforementioned total index score out of 100, creating the Australian Festival Index.
| FESTIVAL NAME | SCALE | VALUE | WEATHER | ACCESS | REPRESENTATION | INDEX SCORE |
| Laneway Festival | 18.5 | 8.1 | 13 | 16 | 20 | 75.6 |
| Spilt Milk | 16.7 | 8.6 | 11.2 | 16 | 13.3 | 65.8 |
| Listen Out | 11.3 | 8.7 | 10 | 16 | 13.3 | 59.4 |
| Good Things | 9.8 | 11.5 | 15.4 | 16 | 6.7 | 59.3 |
| Beyond The Valley | 15.3 | 10.5 | 10.8 | 12 | 8.9 | 57.5 |
| WOMAdelaide | 6.8 | 11.3 | 13.7 | 18 | 6.7 | 56.4 |
| Wildlands | 8.3 | 8.5 | 11.6 | 14 | 13.3 | 55.8 |
| Field Day | 6.6 | 9.4 | 12.4 | 16 | 8.9 | 53.3 |
| Bassinthegrass | 1.9 | 10 | 19.8 | 8 | 8.9 | 48.6 |
| Promiseland | 8.2 | 9.4 | 10.6 | 14 | 5.3 | 47.5 |
| Lost Paradise | 4.5 | 10.5 | 8.8 | 14 | 8.9 | 46.7 |
| Knotfest | 8.9 | 12 | 9.7 | 16 | 0 | 46.5 |
| Deni Ute Muster | 4.7 | 8.7 | 15.6 | 8 | 8.9 | 45.9 |
| Pitch Music & Arts | 5.9 | 9.4 | 12.0 | 4 | 13.3 | 44.6 |
| Woodford Folk Festival | 6.1 | 13.1 | 10.8 | 4 | 6.7 | 40.7 |
| CMC Rocks QLD | 7.6 | 8.8 | 11.2 | 10 | 0 | 37.6 |
| Golden Plains | 0 | 8 | 10.1 | 10 | 8.9 | 37 |
| Bluesfest Byron Bay | 7.8 | 9.2 | 7.3 | 8 | 0 | 32.3 |
| Gympie Music Muster | 0.8 | 10.2 | 8.7 | 8 | 0 | 27.8 |
| Mundi Mundi Bash | 1.5 | 4 | 12.1 | 0 | 8.9 | 26.5 |
Methodology
- For the purposes of the index, the original location was chosen for any festival that takes place in multiple locations. When there was no difference, the biggest city was chosen as the location.
Sources
- Festival tourism: Tourism Research Australia
- Weather data: Australian government Bureau of Meteorology (nearest cities used for more rural locations)
- Popularity data: Local authorities and Instagram
- Access data: Adelaide University ARIA remoteness + Australian Disaster Resilience Index
- Representation data: Each festival lineup – when a 2025/26 lineup was unavailable, the most recent lineup was used