Download Festival 2017 / Photos: Katja Ogrin / Getty Images

Download Festival “Not In A Hurry” To Expand Across Australia

UPDATE: Download Festival Plans To Expand Into More Aussie Cities “Sooner Than Later”

ORIGINAL STORY: Download Festival‘s Australian booker says the event is “not in a hurry” to expand across Australia, given the current state of the country’s festival economy.

Organisers had previously announced plans to expand the festival into other cities after its Aussie debut in Melbourne next year, but in a just-released ‘short documentary’ about bringing the event down under, Download Festival Melbourne booker Nigel Melder says organisers will be taking their time.

“Ideally, we’re gonna build this. We’re not in a hurry. It’s a very hard economy, and we can’t be putting up eight stages and touring things all around Australia from the get go, and I don’t know if it will ever get to that point again,” Melder says.

“Or if it will, I think it’s gonna take a very long time to reset.”

That said, Melder claims the Download team still wants to “see this thing go for a very long time, as it has done in the UK and as is building in Europe”.

Elsewhere in the video, which you can watch below, Download Festival’s UK promoter Andy Copping says organisers first started considering bringing the festival down under around 2013, when the now-defunct Soundwave Festival was still alive and well.

“We’ve been thinking about bringing Download to Australia for the last few years now,” he says. “I guess we first started talking about it around four years ago.”

Copping’s comments come after Soundwave Festival founder AJ Maddah — who isn’t involved with Download Australia — said heavy music fans need to give the event “a chance to grow”, after its debut Aussie lineup was met with criticism from some music-lovers.

The first-ever Australian edition of Download Festival will take place on Saturday, 24th March 2018 at Melbourne’s Flemington Racecourse. Learn more about all of the acts on the lineup in the gallery below.

EXCLUSIVE: The Big-Name Acts Download Festival Australia Missed Out On

Get To Know The 2018 Download Festival Australia Lineup

(In no particular order…)

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