Sonisphere Festival 2012 has officially been cancelled meaning that Download’s only real rock festival rival has disappeared in an implosion of badly handled PR, lack of any hype and terrible timetable for line up announcements. Is it really as much of a tragedy as many of Sonisphere’s fans are claiming? Possibly. Is it completely and utterly their own fault? Definitely. With the lineup compromising legends such as Queen (THE Queen with Adam from American Pop Idol taking over vocal duties), Kiss and Faith No More this had one of the most interesting headliner line ups ever and I thought Queen and Kiss would be enough to draw ticket sales. Unfortunately this hasn’t proved to be the case and the organisers have pulled the plug. In this article I intend to look at some of the reasons for the breakdown in a festival that many were heralding as the new Download.

Typically Download and Sonisphere would usually begin to announce bands around October at the earliest to January at the latest. Sure enough Download slowly began to reveal what was an increasingly epic line up for rock and metal fans around November time and have been making steady and regular announcements since. Sonisphere on the other hand proceeded to spend that time posting jokes on their Facebook page, videos of past Sonisphere performances and telling everyone what was “on their playlist at the minute” and of course fans awaiting an announcement got increasingly agitated. Should they wait to see if good old Soni pulls it out of the bag or should they buy tickets to this year’s amazing Download line up before they’re sold out? When Sonisphere finally made an announcement it had the making of a pretty good line up. But instead of building on the initial announcement of 20 bands they go quiet again allowing Download to pull further ahead in the ticket-sales race.

Sonisphere and to be honest Download as well need to grow up. When fans voice anger or concerns on their social network pages, what do they get? Ignored or trolled in a post. There’s no relationship between the two, just the silent childish festival and the worried and angry customers. The festivals need to learn to mature. Look at Reading & Leeds; they’ve played it cool, made one frankly incredible announcement and then gone quiet again. No bad jokes, dumb retweets of bad memes like Download and Sonisphere seem to waste their time doing. If they put as much time into planning the festival as they do messing around on Facebook then they’d probably have saved their festival, instead they’ve got to rip down almost a years’ worth of planning, cancel over 110 bands and refund those loyal enough to already have tickets.

What do you think? A massive tragedy for the music scene? Or has the festivals organisers’ childish behaviour and bad handling finally caught up with them? Comment below and we’ll get a discussion going.