Sharon Osbourne, the British TV personality, music manager and the widow of rock icon Ozzy Osbourne, has confirmed that there are plans to put on another edition of the Ozzfest traveling festival in 2027. “ Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we’re gonna do it,” she said during a February 6 appearance at MIDEM 2026 at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes, France. “Well, the last one we did was 2018. It was just a month before Ozzy got sick, and that was at the Forum in L.A. And there was no plans to stop it. We were still gonna do it, but Ozzy couldn’t. And Ozzy and I would talk about it, and he’d say, ‘Do you think Ozzfest would work without me?’ And I’m, like, ‘Yeah, it’s a brand. It will work without you.’ And he said, ‘We should do it.'”
This past January, Sharon told Billboard magazine that she had been “talking to Live Nation” about bringing Ozzfest back. “It was something Ozzy was very passionate about: giving young talent a stage in front of a lot of people,” she explained. “We really started metal festivals in this country. It was [replicated but] never done with the spirit of what ours was, because ours was a place for new talent. It was like summer camp for kids.”
Sharon told Billboard that she had a new vision for the next iteration of Ozzfest. “I’d like to mix up the genres,” she said.
Ozzfest started 30 years ago and was the first national music festival of its kind dedicated to hard rock music.
The event has not been a traveling festival in the U.S. since 2007’s “free” edition. The show morphed into a one-off event in Dallas in 2008, took 2009 off and played just six cities in 2010.
Over 17,000 concert-goers were in attendance for 2017’s all-day Ozzfest, which was headlined by Ozzy, while Rob Zombie closed out the next day’s Knotfest bill.
2017 was the second year Ozzy’s Ozzfest had merged with SLIPKNOT’s Knotfest for a two-day heavy metal juggernaut.
A special one-night-only New Year’s Eve Ozzfest took place on December 31, 2018 at The Forum in Los Angeles, California and was attended by 12,465 hard rock and heavy metal fans, according to Pollstar. Ticket sales from the Live Nation-produced concert totaled $1.2 million, with tickets priced from a low of $59.50 to $179.50.
Joining headliner Ozzy Osbourne at the event were Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, KORN’s Jonathan Davis (playing a solo set) and BODY COUNT. ZAKK SABBATH, the BLACK SABBATH tribute band fronted by Osbourne’s guitarist Zakk Wylde, headlined a second stage outside.
Sharon previously floated the possibility of reviving Ozzfest during a January 2024 episode of “The Osbournes” podcast. When Sharon and Ozzy’s daughter Kelly noted that “it always comes down to” whether the bands and managers going to be “realistic” in terms of what they want to get paid for playing the festival, Sharon concurred, and added: “It’s great. That’s what we wanted — everybody to do spin-offs and do their own festivals, and it’s great. It’s great for fans; it’s brilliant. But why is it when it comes to us that everybody thinks that we are trillionaires, and so that every manager who wants their band on our festival wants one of the fucking trillions they think we’ve got to put on the festival?”
After Ozzy asked during the podcast about the possibility of focusing more on lesser-known acts that won’t be as demanding, Sharon said: “You can do it for a baby stage, but you still need the headliners. It’s always great to have the baby stage, I mean, that’s what it’s all about — breaking new bands. That’s why we did it.”
She added: “It’s very hard for acts who are not known to suddenly go and be in front of 50,000 people on a main stage at a festival and understand what they’re meant to do. It’s very intimidating. You could have maybe five thousand people at that baby stage, and then to go from five to fifty to sixty thousand people, and it’s really, really hard for baby bands. They’ve pay their dues anyway. That’s what it’s all about.”
When Sharon and Ozzy’s son Jack pointed out that many of the recently launched rock festivals in the United States are “basically just Ozzfest,” Sharon said: “Well, it’s the same bands just going around and around and around. But that’s what’s so good, because we started something, people have taken it, and it’s still great for the genre. It’s really good.”
In October 2023, Sharon talked about why Ozzfest eventually stopped during an earlier episode of “The Osbournes” podcast. At the time, she said: “Yeah, it was a very weird beast because all the bands were our mates, but the managers were greedy and for some reason they thought that we were making billions on it and we weren’t. We made a profit. But it was not like — we couldn’t retire on it. And managers and agents wanted more and more and more, and it just wasn’t cost effective anymore. We stopped, because it just wasn’t cost effective.”
She continued: “Years and years ago, one of the bands — it was the second Ozzfest we did, or the third — wouldn’t go on stage until I agreed to give them 10,000 more dollars. And they were holding everything up, and I said, ‘Of course, of course I’ll give it you.'” Pressed by Jack to name the act in question, Sharon said “Glenn Danzig”, to which Jack replied: “Why are you gonna protect that twat?”
Sharon went on to say that she “didn’t give them the money” that they were demanding. “They went on and played, and I went, ‘Fuck you. You signed a contract, your agent agreed it, and you’re just gouging,'” she recalled.