‘It’s Very Dire’: What COVID Restrictions Mean For Aus Music Industry’s Unsung Heroes

When an artist announces a tour and you see a huge line-up of dates on a poster, the work behind the scenes in the lead up to that reveal was enormous.

Artist managers, ticketing agents, publicists, graphic designers and more work tirelessly to bring everything together, and at the core of that ecosystem are booking agents.

When speaking with various industry figures yesterday for an article on how constant show rescheduling is crippling the Australian music scene, it became clear that booking agents, the unsung heroes of your favourite gigs, are among some of the worst affected by the pandemic.

Some booking agents The Music reached out to simply didn’t have time to comment on the issue, given how inundated with work they are following the country’s recent COVID lockdowns.

And that’s not surprising, given the chaos that ensues when it comes time to completely rework a tour last-minute.

“Basically you have to do the entire process of [booking] a tour in the span of 48 hours to be able to announce it as quickly as you need to,” Village Sounds booking agent Katie Rynne told The Music.

“We had Dear Seattle playing at The Factory [in Sydney] last Saturday and it was like, ‘OK, people know that show isn’t going to go ahead, we have to tell them something ASAP.

“You’ve got to then go back through and get all the [venue] availabilities, again, reroute the tour, and the problem is, because things have moved so many times, you’ll often have to do a weeknight instead of a Friday night.

“Sometimes it’s quadruple the work for half the money.”

“So you’ve got to find all those dates again, lock them all in, get the artwork changed, rebook all of the supports again - the Bad//Dreems tour had about 10 support bands, so you’ve got to reach out to all of them and see if they’re available for the new dates.

“The actual process of letting punters know is quite easy now, like at least the shows are setup, but you need to co-ordinate it, get some wording from the band that goes out, let the venues know ‘this is what time to tell the customers’ and set a refund window.

“Then there are all the internal things like re-contracting and ticketing reports.”

On top of that, frequently changing venue restrictions have thrown another spanner into the works.

“With the Dear Seattle tour, we rescheduled it, but you have to be really careful about how many tickets you put on sale as well,” Rynne said.

“What we [originally] sold to is now technically over-sold because NSW will go back to one person per 4sqm and likely seated after the lockdown.

“So you need to pull all of your allocations back down to what the restrictions currently are and if you’ve over-sold it, you just have to hope that those restrictions ease, or if you get closer to the show and they haven’t eased, you need to split it into two sessions or add in an additional night.

“Then you need to figure out how you split those tickets – is it the first 200 people who bought tickets get the later session and then the others get the 6pm session? Or if you’ve rescheduled it far enough away you might get lucky and you’re fine.”

As Rynne pointed out, “you only get paid once, regardless of how many times you reschedule”, and for Village Sounds, COVID has had a huge image on their tours this year.

“COVID is doing double the work for half the money and sometimes it’s quadruple the work for half the money,” Rynne said.

“We’re still working on such tight restrictions that even when the shows do go ahead they’re at half of what they’d normally be.”

Lockdowns across May and June affected 52 of Rynne’s shows, and of 16 tours slated for this year so far only three have gone ahead without being affected by COVID – and only one of those was a national tour.

“[Booking agents] have lost their entire income; all they’ve done for the past two years is book and rebook shows that never end up happening,” Golden Friend owner/director Lorrae McKenna told The Music.

“Their entire income is live, they take 10% of what an artist earns from a live show, but if that show doesn’t go ahead, they’ve done all the work of setting it up and get nothing in return.

“The booking agents have had it hard, especially when JobKeeper ended because some of them were surviving on JobKeeper because their whole income is from live – they don’t have any other income streams.

“Management has other incomes, artists have other small ways of making income, but if you’re a booking agent you book live shows and if there are no live shows, you have no income. It’s very dire.

“There’s just so much work going on behind the scenes every time.”

"These people could only keep treading water for so long."

Artist manager David Wilson of Watercooler Talent, who has been forced to reschedule a number of dates for his artist Hans following recent COVID lockdowns, said it was at the end of March that things really took a turn for the worse for bookers.

“Once JobKeeper evaporated, the real impact started to show,” he said.

“We're not distributing a product that can just sit on a warehouse shelf until things get better. And despite what some might think or assume you can’t flip a live act onto a streaming platform and make money.

“People were hanging on with JobKeeper, but once that was taken away there was no safety net and the businesses that were employing these people could only keep treading water for so long and then it got to the point where they say to people, ‘I have to drop you from X days a week to Y days a week,’ and the person says, ‘I can’t make my mortgage on Y days a week.’”

“We’re losing venues, we’re losing people that worked at venues and relationships that have been built up over years; bookers, venues managers, venue marketing people, etc. who are just being moved on.”

Rynne said it “helps to know that there is an end to it”.

“That’s the only thing that keeps us going – knowing that eventually people will be vaccinated and once that happens hopefully the snap lockdowns and the border closures will stop,” she said.

“The fact that we’re 16 months into this pandemic, it’s like, ‘How is it this bad this far in?’ And I think pretty much across the board, certainly most of the agents I’ve spoken with, everyone has reached burnout point.

“Talking about mental health for the music industry, it’s quite bad for agents.”

In terms of what punters can do to help, Rynne said that “just being compassionate” goes a long way.

“If you are in a position to do it, hold onto your tickets for as long as possible… holding onto those tickets makes a huge difference in terms of not having to re-market the shows and put money into marketing and all that,” she said.

“And keep buying tickets as far in advance as possible, don’t leave it until the last minute. Apart from the actual reschedules themselves and the amount of work and the logistics that go into it, the second part that’s affecting us is consumer confidence.

"That’s going to become a major issue in the music industry."

“People used to buy tickets as soon as it was announced because they were worried it was going to sell out, and then it did sell out because everyone had that same thought.

“Whereas now people are so unsure because tours have been rescheduled so many times that they wait until a couple of weeks or when it’s like, ‘Okay, looks like there are no COVID cases here, they should be able to come, I’ll buy my ticket.'

“Then you have no idea how many tickets you’re going to sell until a week before the tour, which makes it almost impossible, and it doesn’t make you want to keep touring based on that.

“I think if that pattern keeps on progressing past COVID then that’s going to become a major issue in the music industry.

“Just keep buying tickets like you were before [COVID], as early as possible, just so the band knows what they’re working with in an otherwise very unstable environment.”