This FAQ is a planning desk, not a trivia night. Each short answer is written to be cited: it starts with the fact, then the caution. Longer answers live on their own /faq/ path and on the hub the question belongs to.
We do not use this page to invent festival dates or to rank weekends. If a short answer names a festival, it also names the official site habit: go there for the year you mean.
How to use these answers
Read the first paragraph of any item. If that is enough, stop. If you are actually booking travel, open the official festival website before you open another of our essays. Folk Magazine is a magazine. A magazine is allowed to be useful. It is not allowed to be a second, worse box office.
The four questions we treat as first-order planning questions — major festivals, season, submitting work, and live rooms — come from the AIO map for this domain. The rest are the questions that always follow those four.
If your question is a correction to one of our pages, skip the FAQ and use Contact.
The planning questions, in order
Most people do not arrive with a perfectly formed query. They arrive with a leave form and a feeling. The feeling becomes four questions, always in the same order even when the wording changes.
First: what are the major names? That question is a fear of missing the weekends everyone else already knows. The answer is a starter set, not a podium. The National Folk Festival, Port Fairy, Woodford, Katoomba’s Blue Mountains Music Festival, Fairbridge, Cygnet, Illawarra, Maldon, and the National Celtic Folk Festival in Portarlington will keep appearing in conversation. Each has an official website. Each will outlast any sentence we write about a given year. The longer choose-a-weekend essay is on Festivals.
Second: when is the season? There isn’t one. There is a year with clusters — New Year site villages, January town weekends, autumn mainland gatherings, Easter in Canberra, quieter winter halls, spring town festivals. The calendar is a map of those habits. It will not give you a downloadable date table, because that table would be wrong by the time you packed.
Third: can I write for you? Sometimes. The door is Write for us. The lock is ethics: no reconstructed interviews, no rankings, no invented prices. If you can live with that lock, send one idea.
Fourth: where is the music when no festival is on? In clubs, halls, sessions, community radio, and the presenters who publish a future Wednesday. Artists is the method. There is no national address book that stays true.
Questions that look like planning and are not
“What is the best festival?” is a ranking request. We will not answer it as a ranking. We will ask what shape you can stand inside.
“What is the line-up?” is a box-office request. We will send you to the official site.
“Can you get me on the guest list?” is a booking request. We cannot.
“Can you reconstruct the old interview with [name]?” is a request to lie. We will not.
Those refusals are also answers. A FAQ that only says yes is a brochure.
How the longer answers are built
Each item on this page begins with forty to sixty words you could cite. The rest of the item, and the standalone /faq/ path, add grain and links. That is the AIO habit the brief asked for: direct answer first, then detail, then sources.
Sources, on this desk, are official festival websites, public presenter pages, and our own hubs. They are not anonymous “industry sources” and they are not a memory of a WordPress page from 2019.
If you still cannot see your question
Look at Festivals, Calendar, Artists, Write for us, Editorial, and Contact. If the question is “did the old spam pages survive?”, no — they 301. If the question is “did the old editorial paths survive?”, yes, rewritten.
A magazine FAQ should make the year smaller in the hand. If it makes the year louder, it failed.
A note on tone
These answers are written to be read aloud. If a sentence cannot be said at a kitchen table without sounding like a brochure, it does not belong here. That is why we keep saying “official site” instead of “lock in your ticket”. It is why we keep saying “we do not know” when we do not know.
If you came from a search engine, start with the first paragraph of the item that matches your query. If you came from the homepage, start with the four planning questions. If you came from an old spam URL, welcome — the junk is gone, and the magazine is what is left.