Organizing Swiss Music Festivals: Balancing Creativity and Financial Viability from Niche Events to Large-Scale Festivals

Music festivals operate in an increasingly challenging landscape shaped by rising artist fees, growing competition, limited public funding, and changing audience expectations. In this context, festival organizers must balance maintaining and innovating their creative identity to attract audiences while also ensuring long-term financial viability. This case study explores how festival managers in Switzerland navigate this tension through strategic decision-making, thereby addressing a gap in the academic literature, particularly as the Swiss music festival context, remains largely unexplored. Drawing on ten semi-structured interviews with organizers from diverse festivals, the research identifies five key strategic areas: financial risk mitigation, cost control, creative innovation, internal organizational expertise, and external collaboration. To mitigate financial risk, festivals emphasized the importance of building reserve funds, securing long-term sponsorships, and using community-based crowdfunding. Cost management strategies included limiting artist fees, minimizing fixed costs, and maximizing the use of volunteer labor. Creative innovation was driven by audience-oriented programming and immersive design. Commercial festivals often used lifestyle trends to enhance their appeal, while non-profit festivals focused on community-centered programming. Having long-term team members and post-event evaluations were key for continuity, learning, and future planning. Lastly, external collaboration proved particularly valuable for non-profit festivals. Coordinating event dates, sharing resources, and engaging in joint advocacy helped reduce operational challenges and enhanced their collective influence in cultural policy discussions. Notably, this finding challenges earlier assumptions that such collaborations are only initiated in times of crisis or under external pressure, showing instead that they can emerge as a deliberate and strategic choice. Overall, organizers do not see creative identity and financial viability as opposing goals but as mutually reinforcing, with financial stability enabling creative risks and unique programming and experiences helping to attract audiences and sponsors. This study contributes to the festival management literature by offering empirical insights into how festivals navigate the complex relationship between creativity and financial sustainability within the underexplored Swiss context. Furthermore, it extends existing theory by illustrating that collaboration between music festivals can be a proactive strategy. It also offers practical guidance for organizers seeking to balance innovation with long-term viability.