Senior music industry figures are for the first time sounding the alarm over the takeover of the Australian live music industry by US-based corporate giants, including a company that counts the government of Saudi Arabia as one of its biggest shareholders.
According to Sloan, the power these companies wield means smaller players are forcibly sucked into their orbit. The fact that many artists felt compelled to sign unfavourable contracts at Splendour this year was, according to a number of managers and booking agents who spoke to this masthead, a result of the market power wielded by Live Nation. Its near monopoly on Australia’s biggest festivals means that artists have very little capacity to negotiate and set terms more favourable to themselves.
For many years legendary Australian promoters, the late Michael Gudinski and Michael Chugg resisted the lure of US cash. But in 2019, facing these juggernauts they rolled their businesses into the Mushroom Group’s Frontier Touring. It was a formidable team, but they needed backup: so they inked a joint venture with AEG, the second largest US touring company after Live Nation, cementing the “big three” who would come to rule the Australian music industry.
Their market dominance has been built on the back of a relentless acquisition of local companies that Brian “Smash” Chladil, founder and CEO of Oztix, a locally owned and independent ticketing company, describes as “a frenzy of buy-outs”. Artists are also being squeezed by being locked into lengthy exclusive windows of as much as three months prior and post festivals. Those exclusivity periods mean artists on a Live Nation festival bill can’t play their own shows, unless it’s in a venue designated by the concert promoter. This one-size-fits-all-approach is particularly damaging to artists on the bottom half of festival bills who are making little if anything from the festivals, but are then unable to perform themselves.
Since they’re all really DRUG festivals rather than actual music festivals, can we assume these ‘overseas giants’ are involved in drugs too?
Nobody cares In a global world the scene is global