The organiser for the recently cancelled Echo Festival, Paxton Talbot, has said he has no doubt that if the event hadn't moved to Auckland, it would've been a success.

The festival was originally supposed to take place at McLaren Falls Park in the Bay of Plenty, spanning three days and including camping.

Paxton Talbot on the site of the McLaren Falls Music& Arts Festival. Photo: Tracy Hardy.

It was supposed to be New Zealand's answer to Coachella or Glastonbury, and boasted a line-up including the likes of The Flaming Lips, Jamie xx, Disclosure, CourtnEy Barnett and Kurt Vile.

Instead, it dropped a day and moved to a venue which screams the opposite of a summer festival: Vector Arena in Auckland.

Paxton was forced out after running into issues with resource consent, and he tells The Wireless once the move was announced, ticket sales slowed dramatically.

He wouldn't comment directly on how many tickets had sold but said it was "nowhere near" Vector's 12,000 capacity.

"Nobody came to the table. We had massive web traffic, loads of interest but nothing was turning into sales and it's an extremely expensive project," Paxton told The Wireless.

"You can't bank on last minute sales. You can't bank on three or four thousand people rocking up in the last week because it doesn't happen."

He says ticket sales were tracking "very nicely" with McLaren Falls, a gig he organised because he "knew that's what Kiwis wanted".

However, Paxton failed to get the necessary resource consent from the Western Bay of Plenty District Council and in order for any consent to go through on time, he'd have needed to submit a "non-notified application" - taking more time and money.

"If you're going to put $100,000 into a resource consent process and it ends negatively, then that's money down the drain," he says.

Paxton says he alone was funding the festival, and wouldn't say how much he'd lost in the process but said running it would've cost millions.

"I'm disappointed for the audience. I don't blame the audience for not buying – I know there was an audience out there that wanted to buy and wanted to be part of this gig – but we have to make business decisions based on the evidence available to us," he said.

"All the promoters out there are struggling at the moment because of low ticket sales. It's a massive issue. Every single one of them. People need to get out there and they need to start supporting their local promoters and their local shows."

Echo is the second music festival to be outright cancelled this year, following the loss of SoulFest last month which was also due to low ticket sales.