By Callum Ludwig
The Australian Government’s Standing Committee on Communication and the Arts opened an inquiry into the country’s live music industry in the wake of some of the largest music festivals being cancelled and some of the most iconic venues shutting down.
Danny Grant was an organiser of the Hello Sunshine festival held at the Caribbean Park in Scoresby in March and has also garnered a following of almost 40,000 people on his TikTok page ‘DannyRants’ for his insight into Melbourne’s nightlife and music events over his two decades in the industry, having promoted, owned and ran nightclubs, music festivals and other events.
Mr Grant said the need for the inquiry is well-founded, with Covid-19 having had a massive effect on the industry and with support having been offered for a year before the industry was left to fend for itself again.
“We need more major investment in Australian artists, currently, we’ve got a bad dollar and we have to pull out more American or worldwide artists to try to pull crowds or get interest and I think that can be attributed to the lack of support that a lot of music industry has had from the government currently in Australia,” he said.
“It’s making those boundaries and challenges harder to pass over in order to get people to get off the couch and come to an event and the old, solely Australian lineup is almost becoming impossible to be able to facilitate to make sure you get a crowd.”
In 2024 alone, well-established events like Groovin’ The Moo (poor ticket sales) and Splendour in the Grass (‘unexpected events’) have been cancelled ahead of time and the Pitch Music and Arts Festival was called off on the second day of the four-day event due to extreme heat.
In the last decade, Falls Festival didn’t return in 2023 despite making an initial comeback from Covid-19 enforced cancellations and a bushfire emergency in 2019, FOMO was cancelled in 2020, Mountain Sounds in 2019, Stereosonic in 2016, Future Festival in 2015 and Big Day Out in 2014.
Mr Grant said we need to showcase and help make artists from Australia bigger so that our festivals then can support more interest.
“The second part is the cost of everything, from fencing to security to APRA (the authority for music royalties in Australia), PPCA (copyright collecting society for recorded music) and all the government costs we are going to have to pay are going higher and higher and higher,” he said.
“It’s hard to make it affordable for people to come to a festival and watch people that they want to see and want to follow and as a result of that, we’re seeing their collapse of some of these Goliaths of festivals.”
As well as the struggling festivals, famous Melbourne live music venues have been shut or had to sell up having previously previously paved the way for up and coming and local artists, including Collingwood’s Bendigo Hotel (closed in 2023) and The Tote (2020), The Palace Theatre (2014), The Reverence Hotel (2019), The Brunswick Hotel (2019) and the Ding Doong Lounge (2018) have all shut their doors in the last 10 years, among others.
Mr Grant said with the rise of streaming platforms, Australia needs to revisit how to build up the careers of artists from the grassroots.
“In the decade prior to Covid, we had artists like Flume, Will Sparks, Dom Dolla, Tame Impala or The Jungle Giants, all these different Australian artists who blew up and a lot of that was to do with government support because they had programs like Down to Earth and things like that,” he said.
“The government’s not moving with the times, in my opinion, when it comes to how they’re financing the Australian arts and media industry, they’re still relying on the old system of giving money to somewhere like Triple J, and then hoping that Triple J can build artists, but it’s not happening the same anymore.”
“There needs to be a shake-up in how they’re distributing the funds, because at the end of the day, the majority of the time when big artists have come up or blown up in the last three or four years, it has been from the underground and it has been with zero support from the government.
Mr Grant’s Hello Sunshine festival had an all Australian lineup including the likes of Bliss N Esso, Brad Cox, Grinspoon, The Veronicas, Pete Murray, The Temper Trap and Selby local Anya Alchemy as well as a range of food trucks, market stalls, a FMX show and other activities.
Hello Sunshine 2024 hosted 10,000 people and aims to bring in 14,000 to 15,000 for the 2025 event, according to Mr Grant.
Other small festivals held locally have also seen recent success amidst the rubble of some giants of music events, with the Gaytimes festival for the LGBTQIA+ community held in Gembrook consistently popular while the River Folk Festival in Warburton set for its fifth edition this year.
Director of the River Folk Festival Sam Watson said he thinks the only way out of the situation is greater support for live music venues, live music promoters and festivals from external sources if the income from ticket sales is waning.
“I still feel that the live events industry as a whole, not just music but the live events industry as a whole, was the first to be hit by the pandemic and I still believe the hardest hit and the least supported in terms of the support filtering down to all levels of the industry,” he said.
“A festival having a bad year or festival cancelling one year is not great for anyone, it’s not great for morale or trust in that festival and if this pattern continues, we’re going to start seeing fewer international acts coming over to Australia because there will be less certainty in the guarantee of their performance and their performance fee,”
“The effect of cost of living on a patron’s ability to buy a ticket doesn’t translate as heavily on smaller festivals like ours as it does on a major festival like Splendour and I can’t really comment on a qualitative reason for the move towards these more niche community-based festivals but on a very practical level the lower cost and greater accessibility of them does help.”
Mr Watson was in attendance at a conference during the National Folk Festival what was held over the Easter weekend where sustainability, including financially, was discussed.
M Watson said one of the significant points that came out of that was not programming large-scale headline acts that chew up most of the artist budget.
“Support the smaller acts who are emerging because if they don’t have that opportunity or don’t have that stage to perform on, their careers aren’t going to advance in any way further,” he said.
“Having an opportunity locally is one of the fundamental things an artist will look for, whether that’s a pub venue, a small local music venue or a local festival with intra and interstate traffic is big for the sustainability of the industry.”
