'A Dangerous Predicament': Why Aus Music Industry Desperately Needs A Roadmap Out Of COVID

Constant lockdowns and venue restrictions are crippling the music industry and having a huge impact on those working within it, and for many, there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel.

Since March 2020, the industry has been pleading for a roadmap out of the pandemic and yet, 15 months after COVID took control of Australia, we’re no closer to having such a plan.

The recent string of lockdowns across the country have only made things worse, and highlighted just how bad things are and where we’re headed if we continue on this course.

The Music spoke with Australian Live Music Business Council (ALMBC) founding board member Brian ‘Smash’ Chladil, who is also the CEO of the country’s largest independent ticketing company, Oztix; Sophie Kirov, director of touring and logistics company Lost Motel; and more to gain insight into where we’re at, where we’re going and what needs to be done.

Chladil told The Music that the “past couple of weeks have just been absolutely horrific for everyone”.

“This time around it’s been particularly bad because we’ve had the double whammy of coming out of a Melbourne lockdown - which hurt everyone and we hadn’t even really started to recover - and then Sydney went into lockdown, Brisbane went into lockdown, South Australia and then WA,” he said.

“That has just really taken us back 15 months to when COVID first started."

"We’re really travelling blind at the moment."

“It’s just been an absolute disaster from the point of view of a band or a manager or an agent or a venue; the live music side of the business is just crippled by all this stuff and it’s a real crisis.

“There are thousands of people who are on the bones of their arse and there’s nothing for them.”

According to Kirov, morale within the industry is at an all-time low.

“There’s really no roadmap in place to guide us through, so we’re really travelling blind at the moment,” she said.

“Considering where we’ve come from since March last year, that is starting to get really quite tiring for people and there seems to be a general consensus across the industry that everyone is just pretty exhausted.”

Chladil added: “For the first time since it all started, there’s a definite air in the business that everybody has just hit a wall.

“It really feels like everyone is on the ropes and can’t do it anymore. The amount of people I’ve spoken to in the past couple of weeks that have said, ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this. I just can’t summon the energy to reignite it.’”

Brad O'Brien, who oversees Special Projects & Corporate Events at Premier Artists, reiterated that the best way to help the industry as a punter at the moment is to hold onto your tickets and buy them as early as possible.

One of the main issues when a tour is rescheduled - and a large number of ticketholders request a refund - is that it requires more marketing money to be spent, so costs are rising with no extra return added.

“With some of the shows, we’d budgeted X amount for advertising and promotion and for some of them we’ve had to go double our spend on promotion,” O'Brien said.

“With Cosentino, I just spend another $3,000 on TV [ads] this week to sell out the Narre Warren and Frankston shows, but now I’ve got to postpone at least the Narre Warren date.

“Each lockdown costs us a small fortune.”

When lockdowns come into effect, the resulting consequences for tours and shows have massive roll-on effects.

“Everyone’s scrambling to reschedule dates, there are so many rescheduled shows,” Chladil added.

“After 15 months of rescheduling, you can’t get a date. If you’re a band and you want to play, forget it - you can’t get a date.

“The flow-on effect from that is really bad, because no new business can start. So here we all are: working on the old business, which we haven’t been paid for, and we’ve had to reschedule four times, and no one gets paid until the show happens.

"That is a really dangerous predicament that our industry finds itself in.”

“The problem is, everyone’s got to do the work again, and then again and then again for nothing. And it stops new business from coming in.”

With ongoing financial losses across the board and no new work coming in due to constant rescheduling, we’re starting to see more and more workers leaving to industry, which Kirov said was “a pretty scary place” to be headed.

“We will lose the crew who are incredibly skilled and we’ll lose crew who have spent 10-15+ years really honing their craft and being an incredible wealth of knowledge,” she said.

“I think you also lose that incentive for that new generation to also enter the industry. A couple of years ago, it was a really exciting time with really wonderful support networks and it was encouraging to see new people coming through and also to see all the different mentorship programs and a lot of camaraderie.

“As people start to leave, that doesn’t encourage new people to enter, and it doesn’t encourage young people to enter and that is a really dangerous predicament that our industry finds itself in.”

“The brain drain is real and it’s happening now,” Chladil emphasised.

“I know a guy who for the past 14 years has worked with one of the biggest bands in the world and now he’s driving a bus.

“I’ve had a security company ring me up saying, ‘I don’t think we’re going to be able to do security at all the festivals in summer because my staff have left.’

“So we’ve got all these challenges coming down the pipeline. Once things do start to open up, once everyone is vaccinated, we’re going to have all these other challenges.”

According to Kirov, the recent lockdowns “have really highlighted that we’re far from out of the woods and need to be having really honest conversations about the future of our industry beyond just this one COVID outbreak, but for years to come”.

“We absolutely need to keep putting pressure on state governments to [increase] those capacities, because until we’re at a point where our shows can be finically viable, we’re not going to see tour parties engaging the number of crew that we did, engaging suppliers and building out these budgets as we once did,” Kirov said.

“We need to get those capacities back to 100%.”

“Until we get vaccinated there’s going to be no scene."

Chladil added: “The economic impact is massive and this is where I really believe the Government is struggling to understand the depth and the value that live music brings to the economy.

“If you have a three-band bill playing in a 700-capacity room, it employs over 100 people and has about $100,000 economic value.

“So you’ve got a band who gets kicked out of their show because of a lockdown – that’s $100,000 loss to the economy, 100 people out of a job, and it totally stuffs up the whole tour and invariably it [affects] two or three shows on the tour.

“A little band on tour, that’s a half a million bucks and it’s 500 people who didn’t get a job.”

A big part of increasing those capacities and stopping snap-lockdowns is obviously vaccines.

“Until we get vaccinated there’s going to be no scene,” Chladil said.

“Until the Government stop being negligent and start cracking the whip with vaccinations, there’s going to be no business; everyone is just going to be running on the spot like we have been for 15 months.

“What are we doing about vaccination and is there a way the music industry can help with the vaccination program?

“Why not have a big festival you can only go to if you’re vaccinated, or can the Government say, 'For every person who’s vaccinated that buys a ticket, we’ll give you $5.' Get the music business to encourage punters to get vaccinated.”

Another issue surrounding vaccines and the music industry, as Kirov noted, is demographic.

“It’s still a very confusing program to a lot of people and outside of that, if it is something that is in that roadmap that we need to see vaccine passports at, say, a music festival, you then have to look at the age bracket that is attending a music festival and is the supply of the vaccine even reaching that age bracket just yet?

“It’s really tough to say we can do shows if everyone coming in is vaccinated when our entire demographic can’t even get access to said vaccine.”

Given the state of Australia’s vaccine roll-out, organisations like the ALMBC are doing their best to workshop ideas that will stabilise the industry and help it on its way to recovery.

“The knock-on effect is hundreds of thousands of dollars for everyone involved.”

“We’re working on a roadmap out of this and the roadmap is in stages: one of the stages is a travel permit, and another stage is the lifting of venue capacities, and then the next stage is international arrivals.

“The international arrivals is in two parts: one part is letting people leave the country to pick up their careers and the other part is to let bands in to play."

The “travel permit” for artists will help ensure “that bands aren’t suffering in these lockdown situations”.

“Say a band went to Brisbane and it gets locked down the next day, they can’t finish the tour because they’ve got to quarantine for two weeks and it ruins the whole tour,” Chladil said.

“The knock-on effect is hundreds of thousands of dollars for everyone involved.”

In regard to ALMBC’s plan on getting venue capacities listed, they’re looking more closely at the science behind COVID.

“It’s completely bogus that 35,000 people can go to the footy, but 400 people can’t go to The Zoo. It’s wrong – it’s just wrong,” Chladil said.

“We’re trying to get medical advice and medical science to refute all of these barriers that have been put up to prevent us doing our business.”

It’s also important to keep the conversation going.

“It’s really hard because so much of the country has gone back to ‘normal’ now,” Kirov said.

“There are so many areas where it’s almost like COVID doesn’t exist, or never existed, so I think when we’re having these conversations about an industry being as decimated as the music industry, a lot of people are not really privy to what that actually means and they’re really not aware.

“So I think it’s really important that we continue to push the narrative, even if it feels exhausting - that we continue to make people aware that our industry is very much struggling and that we are not back to normal.

“I know it can feel like we’ve said it all already, and does anyone care, but I think it’s really important to acknowledge that there’s a long way to go and we need to keep really supporting one another and looking out for one another.

“We all have to come out through the other side of this.”