REPLAY NEWS
All of our customers have already been contacted by email prior to this announcement.
A message from the Replay Team
With huge regret, we have to advise you that we have had to make the extremely difficult decision to postpone the 2026 Replay Festival in Perth to May 2027. We fully own this decision and our heartfelt apologies for the circumstances that we are in.
As a team, we have always been honest and transparent in our communication with our customers, and this announcement is no different.
We were encouraged by initial Replay sales against a difficult market and what has proven to be challenging economic times for all of us in Scotland in 2026. The BBC Radio 2 in the Park announcement in Stirling immediately reduced sales for Replay and many other festivals by over 50%. Had we known this event was planned, we would have had an opportunity to delay or postpone, but Stirling Council and the BBC decided to keep it under wraps for over six months before announcing it.
To be clear, the Radio 2 event is subsidised with license payer money and doesn’t contribute in any meaningful way to Scotland’s economy. This is an event that license payers are subsidising at the expense of the non-central belt area that benefit financially and culturally from the local Scottish Festival market, which was always going to be devastated with an event of this size with its free channels for marketing and publicity. The BBC is supposed to be nurturing new talent and encouraging musical development not killing off grassroots Scottish independent music culture from London.
Having actively engaged with BBC executives, we managed to secure a postponement from August until early September, the date they have always held it in England for 15 years to avoid this impact on festivals there which we hoped would help mitigate the downturn.
Over several meetings with BBC executives, we were given a documented assurance from some of the most senior leaders in the organisation that none of the artists for BBC Radio 2 event would be the same as those headlining other local festivals in Scotland.
This undertaking turned out to be false, with their recent announcement that headliners Blue from Replay, Level 42 from Discovery Dundee, Emile Sande from Summers End and Cast from Party in the Palace are all now appearing at the BBC R2 event, plus an approach was also made to our Saturday headliner Natalie Imbruglia which she declined. So, as we were negotiating for solutions in good faith to save the Scottish Festival market, the BBC had already signed their acts and clearly misled us.
We even kept a price freeze on our ticketing tiers, free under 13’s tickets and offered an excellent weekend incentive to locals in a bid to increase numbers attending at Replay. All of our time, effort and enthusiasm have been lost due to the powerhouse that is the BBC. We cannot compete with the BBC in terms of marketing spend, brand awareness and having endless resources available to them from license payers’ money. They have, of course, offered their booked acts enormous and valuable airtime as part of their fee. Whilst we understand that attraction, it is hugely disappointing that some acts, particularly Scottish, have elected to feather their own nest at the expense of independent festivals that helped them grow in their early years and become successful. Simply put, the BBC have acted in poor faith, and this has affected both Replay and other local festivals in 2026, both in terms of brand reputation and financially. You will have seen that many festivals have already fallen before our sad announcement. We are not alone, and this one event has cost Scottish festivals and their supporting infrastructure hundreds of thousands of pounds and has led to the loss of smaller independent events taking place up and down the country. We have tried our very best to get Replay to where we had predicted it would be when we launched in November 2025, but we simply cannot continue and run at a further substantial loss.
In the email to our valued customers, we have given them the opportunity to transfer their tickets to the rearranged date in May 2027, a straight swap with added extras to our friends at Summers End in Brechin or a refund.
As a team, we have tried to be as fair as possible with our offers and would like to thank the team at Summers End in Brechin for their wonderful support in allowing our festival goers to transfer their tickets to their event across the same weekend at no extra cost. and with the added value of parking and camping available.
We would like to extend our appreciation and thanks for the support from Perth and Kinross Council, and we look forward to working with them once again in 2027.
If you are an existing customer of Replay and have yet to receive the email, in the first instance please check any junk or spam folders. If you still haven’t received the email, then please contact us using the form on our website here.
The Replay Festival Team