Soundwave To Subsidise Fans’ Interstate Airfares

Soundwave founder and promoter AJ Maddah has confirmed a deal to subsidise airfares for fans travelling to the festival from interstate locations in a partnership struck with Virgin Airlines.

The festival will accommodate Soundwave punters in out of reach locations by offering cheaper deals on flights to any of the festival’s four summer stops in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

Soundwave is making good on a decision to axe Perth from the its annual tour around Australia, providing fans with “literally the cheapest fares available” and extending the promotion from not just Western Australia, but all Virgin Australia ports nationwide.

“They’re building this widget to go on our website which will be an access point for people to book their fares and from what I’m being told they’re going to be literally the cheapest fares available online anywhere, for anyone,” Maddah said in a report from Music Feeds. “A lot of promoters do these deals with airlines, whereby they come and get a cut of the proceedings from the travel. We’re in fact subsidising it.”

Maddah said the festival was financially unable to “preserve” the Perth stop after attendance plummeted in recent years, but didn’t want to leave the city’s Soundwave regulars out in the cold.

“As it is, it’s gonna be tough for most people to afford to fly and accommodate themselves and come to a festival on the east coast but we wanted to try to make that as easy as possible for those that want to do it,” Maddah said, adding fans across the country had called for a similar help in an effort to attend Australia’s premier heavy metal music festival.

“(Maddah’s “travel tards”) came back and said, ‘Well, we’ve spoken to Virgin and they’re willing to stretch those discounts nationally for us, from any city, to any Soundwave destination.’ So that was quite exciting, beyond what I had expected,” he explained.

A limited number of Soundwave discounted seats are available on a “first booked, first served basis”.

“We want to make it easy for people from Perth or from Darwin or from Tasmania, from places where they don’t get many shows or festivals or events, to be able to travel and come to these shows,” explained Maddah. “It’s not a great deal, but if an extra 5 or 10 bucks helps then we’ll do that.”

Soundwave wasn’t the only festival to feel the pinch of Perth’s dwindling numbers. The now cancelled Big Day Out suffered nationwide attendance drop offs in recent years, but none greater than the iconic festival’s figures in Perth, which dipped as low as 12,000 in 2012 and 19,000 in 2014 following crowds of roughly 35,000 in 2011 and 2013. Maddah has previously stated the huge costs in transferring the festival’s massive lineups between two coasts as another contributing factor to Perth’s axing from the schedule.