Sharon Osbourne has revealed she’s considering bringing Ozzfest back from the dead.
In a new interview with Billboard, the British TV personality, veteran music manager and widow of Ozzy Osbourne confirmed she’s been in early discussions with Live Nation about reviving the legendary touring festival potentially as soon as 2027.
“I’ve been talking to Live Nation about bringing [Ozzfest] back recently,” Sharon said. “It was something Ozzy was very passionate about: giving young talent a stage in front of a lot of people. 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.”
First launched in 1996, Ozzfest became the blueprint for the modern heavy music festival, touring across the U.S., Europe and Japan nearly every year until 2018. From alternative metal, thrash and industrial to metalcore, death metal and black metal, the festival served as a proving ground for underground acts and genre legends alike — with Ozzy Osbourne (and often Black Sabbath) at its core.
While the idea of a revival has floated around for years — including a digital-only experiment in 2022 — Sharon‘s latest comments suggest the wheels may finally be turning again, albeit with a new perspective shaped by a post-Ozzy era.
Sharon also hinted that any future iteration wouldn’t be a carbon copy of the past. “I’d like to mix up the genres,” she said, suggesting a broader sonic scope than Ozzfest’s historically metal-centric lineup.
That genre-fluid approach reflects how festivals — and heavy music itself — have evolved since Ozzfest’s heyday, though Sharon remains adamant that the core mission hasn’t changed: breaking new bands. “It’s always great to have the baby stage,” she explained. “I mean, that’s what it’s all about — breaking new bands. That’s why we did it.”
In a 2024 episode of The Osbournes podcast, Sharon described why smaller stages were essential to Ozzfest’s DNA: “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… it’s really, really hard for baby bands. They’ve paid their dues anyway. That’s what it’s all about.”
The financial realities of reviving Ozzfest have long been a sticking point — something Sharon has never shied away from discussing. “Yeah, sure. Of course,” Sharon replied before the conversation inevitably turned to money.
“It’s great. That’s what we wanted — everybody to do spin-offs and do their own festivals, and it’s great,” she said. “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?”
She echoed similar frustrations elsewhere, noting that escalating artist fees ultimately made the festival unsustainable. “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.”
In addition to Ozzfest talks, Sharon also revealed in the same Billboard article that she’s working with Live Nation on a classical reimagining of Black Sabbath‘s catalog, to be performed by local orchestras and paired with state-of-the-art visuals. So I guess we’ll see what happens with that.
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