Aural Moon - Progressive Rock Discussion

This from Greg last night.

As many of you are aware, ticket sales for Farfest have been very lackluster and there has been no sign of improvement even with all of the promoting and advertising we have done. Unfortunately, with the potential of a huge financial loss, our main underwriter has decided that it's too risky to remain involved financially and therefore will no longer be able to continue funding the festival.

As the festival organizers, we were determined to put on the event but with the recent withdrawal of our underwriter, we are not financially able to absorb the anticipated loss ourselves. As much as we personally love progressive rock and would have loved to have seen these bands perform, the financial impact to our personal lives would have devastating results. Therefore, it is with great sadness and heartache that we have no other option but to cancel Farfest 2012.

Our goal for Farfest was to offer a strong line-up at an excellent location & venue. With this in place we felt it would be a success. For whatever reason (be it the economy, festival time of year and length, festival competition, being a new festival or change in the market for prog festivals in general, etc…) we have sold just over 300 tickets which is a slightly over half of what we needed to avoid any financial loss. We would like to wait to see if tickets sales improve but the band airline tickets need to be purchased now and waiting any longer would increase the probability of ticket buyers incurring expenses.

Many generous people were recently willing to donate to the cause so we considered implementing a crowd-funding campaign. While in theory, this approach might have salvaged Farfest for this year, we were disinclined to pursue it as we felt that we needed to raise too much money in too short of a time frame.

We would like to thank everyone who supported and bought tickets for the festival and in particular the Farfest 2012 Patrons. We would have never gotten as far as we did without them. We would also like to thank the bands for their willingness to participate and their enthusiasm for the event.

Some people have suggested that we reschedule the festival for June of 2013 and although we remain open to the idea, it is unclear whether another multi-day prog music festival in the US will be viable in the future.

For those of you who purchased tickets, the refunds will be handled by the Grand Opera House box office. The payments will automatically be refunded but may take 4 or 5 days for them to get processed. For more information regarding the refunds, please visit the Farfest website.

Although Farfest has been canceled please think about supporting the two remaining festivals on this year's schedule which are Ethelfest and Progday.

Lastly, we would like to thank all the people that helped us along the way which includes Adele Schmidt, Andrew Miller, Bob Rosenthal, Brian Schweinsburg, Chad Hutchinson, Charles Snider, Dan Shapiro, Frank Stickle, Gene Stopp, George Orozco, Helaine Burch, Jim Rezek, Johannes Schult, John Colinge, Jose Zegarra Holder, Ken Golden, Kevin Feeley, Leo Furman, Leonardo Pavkovic, Mark Keill, Mark Krueger, Michael Bennett, Mike Ostrich, Paul Whitehead, Peter Denholtz, Rob LaDuca, Sean McFee, Sean Powell, Uri Breitman & Vicky Powell. We apologize if we have left anyone out.

Progressively Yours,

Greg & Gerry