The dust has settled on Bluesfest 2025 — kind of.
After a short but noisy enquiry into safety concerns raised around this year’s edition of the iconic Byron Bay festival, SafeWork NSW has now quietly backed off. Five separate complaints previously made about crowd control, security, traffic management and general accessibility were enough to trigger a post-festival probe, but not enough, apparently, to warrant any actual consequences.
“SafeWork NSW does not propose to take any further action,” the agency said in a statement today. Translation: there’s nothing to see here, folks.
For Bluesfest organisers, that’s likely a sigh of relief. But it doesn’t erase the bigger story that’s been brewing under the surface — one involving ex-staff calling out toxic culture, a marketing head walking out the door mid-hype cycle, and a whole lot of noise that has nothing to do with guitars.
Festival boss Peter Noble insists the show will go on. Plus, Bluesfest 2026 is already locked in for April 2–5. While there’s no lineup yet, Noble swears he’ll be “working [his] butt off” to make it happen. Still, even he admits that keeping this institution alive into the 2030s is going to take some serious rebuilding.
It helps that Bluesfest is one of a handful of major festivals to score a chunk of change from the NSW Contemporary Music Festival Viability Fund — a financial Band-Aid for an industry bleeding from a thousand cuts. But according to Noble, that lifeline is just the start. “Considerably more is needed,” he says, “for an industry that is severely underfunded.”
Bluesfest might have dodged a regulatory bullet this time, but between internal fractures, public scrutiny, and the uphill battle facing every live music operator in the country, it’s clear the road ahead isn’t just muddy, it’s under real construction.
For now, SafeWork is off their backs. But given the controversy the investigation has caused, the spotlight is still very much on.
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