Location: Bathurst
Offers: Music and cultural festival across multiple venues
We spoke to: Directors Wade Jackson and Jonathan Sequeira
After running in Lithgow for the past two years, Beatlesfest is moving west to Bathurst in August 2025, and this should come as good news to the participating venues along and around Keppel Street. A bevy of live shows and events should bring plenty of people in the door for dinner and drinks, and as an arts and hospitality hub in town, Keppel Street is a natural fit for the festival.
The 2024 festival in Lithgow became the town’s most profitable event for the year, in terms of related profits gathered by accommodation, food, and retail businesses over that weekend. Approximately 3,500 people visited, 75% of whom came from Sydney or further afield. Naturally, director-organisers Wade and Jonathan are ambitious about their young festival growing in size and impact. With its larger number of accommodation options and hospitality venues benefiting year-round from its famous racing industry, among other things, Bathurst made a lot of sense as a new location. This year, they’re hoping to bring out a larger portion of locals and nearby visitors, and that 18-30 year old crowd that can be surprisingly elusive.
What makes Beatlesfest different to Parkes Elvis Festival or the (now sadly dormant) Trundle ABBA Festival? Besides the obvious, for Wade and Jonathan it’s a focus on attracting serious music heads and other creatives, appealing to the wide demographic that the Beatles fandom represents. Along with live performances by various tribute bands like The Lady Beatles, workshops, exhibitions and talks, the festival will feature a vintage clothing market and vinyl fair.
There’s still an element of testing things out this year, getting a sense of the audience and potential scale before plans to expand and explore more avenues for monetisation from the festival in years to come. At this stage the role of the organisers is to ‘outsource but oversee’ the production of various shows and events. They’re just a two-man team currently, managing all sides of logistics, finances, promotion, everything. ‘We knew it was gonna be a lot of work, but not just how much.’
A combination of digital and traditional media channels has been key to their marketing strategy, including a highway banner last year, and they keep a customer database for their mailing list which has proved effective in bringing return visitors. As with any community-centred event, word of mouth promotion is also priceless.
The tourism and events team at Bathurst Regional Council have been really helpful, Wade and Jonathan are happy to confirm, and have shown a lot of enthusiasm and respect for what they’re trying to do, solving problems and contributing ideas. The greatest challenge for Wade and Jonathan in developing this year’s festival has been funding, as they’re still waiting to have their Destination NSW funding confirmed, and have struggled to compete for a limit supply of private sponsorship. The earlier such funding is in place, the easier it is to plan an event like this and ensure its success. Nonetheless, as a multi-venue festival they have the major benefit of not having location costs, a huge overhead expense for most big events. This makes turning a profit easier, and profit is, of course, crucial to the festival’s viability going forward.
Assuming Beatlesfest 2025 is a success, Wade and Jonathan would like future events to expand to envelope more of the town, with shows happening at the various venues on William and George streets, a proper street fair somewhere, and a bigger, main-event style concert at BMEC. The target is 25,000 attendees over a full-week festival. Wade and Jonathan believe that cultural events should be a main driver of tourism to the Central West and any region, not just a side-attraction to wine or sport, and the success of events like Beatlesfest will contribute to this.
Three tips we got from Wade and Jonathan:
- Start small, but always be ambitious.
- Look at what’s been done successfully already and put your own spin on it.
- Take advantage of existing infrastructure and collaborate with venues and creatives that share your vision.
More info:
https://www.beatlesfest.com.au
Beatlesfest 2025 Moves to Bathurst
https://www.bathurst.nsw.gov.au/Council/News-Media/Beatlesfest-2025-Moves-to-Bathurst
Beatlesfest helps rebrand Lithgow as regional towns embrace quirky tourism strategy
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-27/beatlesfest-lithgow-music-festival-tourism-strategy/104402186
Interview and story by Callum Robinson.
This part of a series of profiles on creative people, cultural places and events in the Central West doing great things in the visitor economy.
Image: Little Macca and friends/ Jonathan Sequeira.
