If you have been following the news, you know that Bonnaroo had to cancel the festival after the first day because of heavy downpours and flooding. Bonnaroo is just the latest example of the impact of severe weather on outdoor music events. This is the second time in the last four years that the festival has been cancelled due to the weather. The organizers are not yet providing any dates for 2026 which could be an ominous sign.
While it’s nearly impossible to attribute any one weather event to climate change, we do know that climate change is impacting outdoor concerts and festivals and the artists who perform at them.
There are a myriad of ways climate change impacts our lives and our wallets. We are seeing more frequent and severe weather events, such as heavy rain with flooding, heatwaves, wildfires affecting air quality, drought, and hurricanes. The live entertainment industry is not immune from these effects.
Those of us that produce or manage outdoor concerts and festivals have seen how weather can negatively impact outdoor music events. It’s part of the planning process to have a weather contingency plan in place for any event. For a more in-depth discussion of this process, you can read our article on Outdoor Concert Weather Planning.
Festival and concert organizers are responding. Artists are responding. And unfortunately for our industry, insurance underwriters are responding to the impact of climate change on live outdoor events.
Festival and Concert Organizers’ Response to Climate Change
Outdoor concerts and festivals are reacting by shifting dates to cooler times of the year in some cases or avoiding areas that might be impacted by hurricanes or tropical storms. Shows are being canceled or postponed, delayed and moved up, and artists and festivals are scheduling concerts to work around heat and rain.
Summer music festivals in the South are shifting to earlier or later times of the year to avoid heat and rain events. October has become a major outdoor event month, hosting outdoor concerts and festivals that used to take place in the summer or September. Events that once occurred in June are now taking place in April and May.
Of course, you can’t change holidays such as Memorial Day, Fourth of July, or Labor Day weekends where people expect to enjoy live music in their communities. In Texas, where TSE Entertainment produces many outdoor events, you can expect the 4th and Labor Day to be in the mid-nineties or even hotter temperatures. Having people spend many hours in this weather creates a significant risk for heat-related incidents.
Artists’ Response to Climate Change
Weather is now part of the decision process for booking outdoor shows for many artists. It’s certainly coming into play for larger tours. Not long ago, tours never contemplated weather as part of their tour planning, other than cancellation clause in their contracts. More about that later in this article.
Darryl Eaton — CAA’s co-head of global touring who books shows for Kelly Clarkson and Blink-182 among others — tells Rolling Stone that the weather conditions “very much affects routing of outdoor shows as we seek to avoid extreme heat in some regions, hurricane season in others.”
Adds Kirk Sommer, co-head of music at William Morris Endeavor, “There are times of year you should be looking at. You’re not going to want to play an outdoor show in Mexico in the rainy season and it seems like weather’s a bit more unpredictable. I don’t remember AQI [air quality index] being a topic of conversation until the past five years with the fire. Whenever you’re going outdoors, you’re dealing with elements, sometimes elements you can’t control.”
Even Indoor Concerts May Be Impacted
After having an indoor concert cancelled because of the impact of a hurricane in Houston on electrical infrastructure, the Indie-pop band AJR now plots their show dates to avoid the deep south in mid-August and September, when the Atlantic hurricane season has traditionally peaked.
Event Insurance Underwriters’ Response to Climate Change
Perhaps the biggest response to climate change is taking place in the event insurance industry. The two types of insurance policies that relate to weather for outdoor events are weather and cancellation insurance. For a detailed discussion of all of the various insurance policies for outdoor events, read my articles here: Outdoor Music Concert or Festival Insurance: Part Two,
Artists performing at outdoor events often purchase cancellation insurance to protect the performance guarantees promoters are to pay them in case the show doesn’t happen.
Festival organizers use cancellation insurance to protect their revenues if for some reason they need to cancel the event and refund ticket buyers. They also purchase weather insurance, which is different than cancellation insurance, to minimize any lost income due to weather impacting attendance at their festival or concert.
Insurance Underwriters Have Responded in Two Ways
Weather cancellation claims at outdoor festivals have cut in on insurance companies’ profits. More frequent and severe weather events lead to a higher number of insurance claims related to event cancellations.
Carriers are now putting much greater emphasis on pricing such policies in a more granular way to assure their long-term profitability. The result of those efforts include:
More Sophisticated Risk Modeling: Insurers are investing in more sophisticated climate risk modeling techniques to better assess the risks associated with extreme weather.
“Insurance companies are increasingly relying on historic data about regional weather patterns and spending more time trying to identify the statistical risk based on location and time of year,” says Paul Bassman, a broker with Dallas event coverage firm Higginbotham.
This can lead to more granular and accurate pricing, which means higher premiums for events in high-risk areas or those particularly vulnerable to climate-related disruptions.
Skyrocketing Premiums for Weather-Related Insurance.
Inclement weather, along with a more competitive festival environment, has caused premiums to skyrocket in recent years. A substantial increase in the number of festivals taking place yearly in North America, coupled with an increase in adverse weather, has caused event cancellation and weather insurance premiums to triple and deductibles to balloon in recent years.
Independent Concert and Festival Organizers Feeling More Pain
Tim Epstein, an attorney for independent festivals in North America, says rising premium costs are first felt by indie promoters and organizers. While Live Nation and AEG have begun reducing payouts for festivals that cancel 60 to 30 days in advance, prompting some artists to carry their own policies, indie promoters can’t often stipulate similar terms for their acts, and, as a result, “people are becoming more cognizant of the risks they face from weather,” he says.
In 2025, there has been a noticeable trend of increasing festival cancellations in the United States with a variety of reasons contributing to this trend, including financial difficulties, weather, logistical issues, and insurance headaches,
More than 40 festivals have already been canceled in 2025, according to one count. This suggests a significant number of events are facing challenges. “You have a credit crunch facing festivals across the board,” Will Page, former chief economist of Spotify said. “But particularly the smaller, independent festivals are less able to hedge, less able to negotiate those terms, to manage that cost inflation.”
While insurance premiums and availability contribute to the challenges facing outdoor concerts and festivals, there are a variety of reasons why particular festivals have been cancelled.
Conclusion
In essence, the rising costs and challenges of insuring against climate-related weather events are being passed on to outdoor event organizers in the form of higher cancellation and weather insurance rates. This can lead to increased costs and potentially limited options for obtaining the necessary coverage for outdoor events.
Independent Concert and Festival promoters are seeing the worst effects of these changes as they have less clout to moderate them.
