British Columbia’s Festival Cold War: How Two Giants Are Stifling the Scene They Built

What happens when your favorite underground festivals start acting like rival corporations?

For over a decade, two major festivals have occupied a near-mythological place in Western Canada’s electronic music circuit. More than just parties, these events were—and in many ways, still are—rituals of creative communion. DIY to the core, rooted in community, animated by a shared belief in the power of music to dissolve boundaries and incubate new ideas.

But lately, something feels off.

The sense of mutual respect that once linked the two institutions has eroded into something colder, more calculated. In its place: an arms race. What used to feel like two interconnected nodes of a regional movement now feels like a two-horse marketing war, complete with year-round advertising cycles, exclusive booking battles, and a creeping corporatization of the very culture these festivals helped to define.

They’ve become perpetual branding machines. Scrolling through social media in B.C. means being caught in a constant algorithmic loop of teaser trailers, merch drops, influencer collabs, and promo codes. The identity of the scene—once shaped by sound and setting—is now increasingly dictated by marketing teams and media strategies. And whatever space existed for other voices to emerge is getting drowned out by ad spend.

But beyond the noise, something more damaging is happening quietly behind the scenes: contractual territorialism.

This year, when a local promoter tried to book an artist performing at one of the larger festivals for a gig just a week later—still in the same province—they were met with a hard stop. The artist’s agent explained that the performer was under a strict radius clause, barring them from playing anywhere else in the region for a significant stretch of time.

The timing and location of the blackout are not coincidental. These clauses appear laser-focused on one thing: preventing crossover bookings, and consolidating control over which acts get to be seen where—and by whom.

And while it’s easy to view this as a rivalry between two titans, the fallout lands hardest elsewhere—on smaller festivals, clubs, promoters, and fans.

What once felt like a decentralized and generative scene now feels gatekept, with access controlled not by taste or community value, but by legal language and strategic monopolization. The underground, it turns out, can be gentrified too—not by real estate developers, but by exclusivity clauses and 12-month marketing calendars.

The Decline Is Cultural, Too

Behind the branding and the contracts lies a quieter erosion: a creative stagnation. One of the scene’s flagship festivals—once a bastion of sonic experimentation and subcultural risk—has slowly shifted its curatorial lens away from artistry and toward identity optics, safe bets, and funding compatibility.

The music has taken a backseat to optics. Stages that used to represent divergent sonic philosophies now increasingly blur into one another. Bookings feel algorithmic. Visual design feels templated. The annual themes—once playful and genuinely conceptual—now register as thin veneers of meaning slapped on for the sake of branding coherence. A vibe has been replaced by a pitch deck.

At the root of the problem is a systemic failure in leadership. Too many of the people making decisions aren’t artists—they’re administrators. They know how to write grants, navigate institutional funding, and speak the language of DEI-infused marketing. But they don’t make music. They don’t know what’s bubbling up on the margins. And they’re not accountable to the underground—they’re accountable to their budgets.

Meanwhile, the artists and curators who actually build scenes—who spend their nights in cracked studios, who throw unpermitted warehouse parties, who take real risks—are increasingly locked out of the top. Or worse, used as props to sell tickets to a version of the scene that no longer exists.

The result is a festival culture that looks the part, but feels hollow. It has the gear, the visuals, the aesthetics—but it lacks the edge, the hunger, the danger that made it magnetic in the first place. It’s a simulation of the underground, governed by people who know how to preserve a brand but not push a sound.

This is what happens when “community” becomes a buzzword instead of a practice. When governance shifts away from the makers and toward the managers. When two once-radical festivals stop seeing themselves as part of a scene—and start treating everything around them as competition.

There’s still time to fix this.

But it will require a deep structural shift. Put the artists back at the top. End the culture of exclusivity clauses. Let music dictate the direction again—not marketing metrics. And if that means burning a few bridges with sponsors, so be it. The underground has always been more interesting when it’s broke and honest than when it's rich and hollow.

Because if this keeps going, British Columbia won’t have a scene. It’ll have a playlist in a field, curated by people who think vibes are something you can hire. And that’s not the future anyone asked for.

What happens when your favorite underground festivals start acting like rival corporations?

They’ve nurtured countless artists, launched careers, and brought together communities that stretch far beyond BC. But in 2025, the cracks are showing—and not just in the ways you might expect.

What used to be a symbiotic relationship—two independent festivals feeding and fortifying the same scene—has devolved into a kind of corporate cold war. Both are now engaged in a year-round battle for attention, ticket sales, and narrative dominance. The consequence? A flattening of the cultural space they once expanded.

You feel it in your feed before you feel it on a dancefloor: an endless scroll of promo assets. Lineup drops, early bird countdowns, merch capsules, influencer cameos, sponsored posts. The aesthetic, once rooted in grassroots psychedelia, now feels like it’s being piped through an ad agency in real-time. It’s no longer a festival season—it’s a year-long marketing campaign, and the product isn’t even music anymore. It’s exclusivity. It’s scarcity.

This year, a local promoter attempted to book an artist scheduled to play one of the festivals for a small BC gig the weekend after the festival. The reply from the agent was clinical: the artist is under contract, barred from playing anywhere in the region for weeks. The intention is obvious—to prevent the other from scooping the same names.

On paper, it's business. In practice, it’s cultural suffocation. These kinds of clauses don’t just hurt rival festivals—they actively choke the rest of the scene. They prevent artists from doing club shows. They block other grassroots events from booking talent that could draw new energy. They reinforce a system where two festivals dominate the entire performance window for a significant portion of the summer, and everyone else waits for the leftovers.

And here’s where it gets worse.

What’s happening in BC right now isn’t just a rivalry. It’s a territorial stalemate masquerading as cultural leadership. The province deserves better than two self-mythologizing festivals locking up the calendar and then starving the rest of the community through exclusivity and overreach.

If the 2 festivals want to remain pillars of the underground, they need to act like it. That means ending radius clauses, sharing the stage with other events, and investing in the next generation of scene-builders, not just the next marketing intern.

Until then, the illusion of community will keep getting curated. The actual culture? It's already looking for the exit.