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As the live entertainment industry restarts after months out of action, industry leaders say a lack of government support has kept them on the back foot.
In Melbourne, the city marked the return to live events with a concert for several thousand people held at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl on October 30, followed by the Melbourne Cup Carnival on November 2 and 3, which will host up to 10,000 guests.
The events form part of Victoria’s “vaccinated economy” trials, which are tied to the state’s 80% vaccination target and allow attendance at events for vaccinated participants.
It follows similar rules in states across the country, with NSW requiring venues to maintain 75% capacity for vaccinated attendees. And while live entertainment venues are able to operate at full capacity in most other Australian states, domestic border closures have meant touring companies are still unable to bring acts across the country to perform.
Industry pushes for insurance as touring recommences
Frontier Touring chief operating officer Dion Brant told Business Insider Australia that the industry has been behind the curve in bringing international acts back into the country because of the financial risks around cancellations for the sector. The company has international acts booked from July 2022.
We could have had “internationals in the country” by the end of this year, Brant said, if governments had factored the sector into its ongoing support packages for reopening.
Frontier, one of Australia’s largest concert promoters, drives the majority of Australia’s international touring.
While Brant accepts that reopening roadmaps have been fluid and contingent on reaching vaccination targets, he said it has meant the live entertainment sector has been unable to bounce back as quickly as those in the arts or hospitality.
“We are now in a situation where, largely, there will be very few if any international artists [who enter the country] who have just been fortunate enough to be rescheduled into that period a year ago.”
In response to this slow restart, and continued uncertainty around future booking, the sector has called for a new national insurance scheme, modelled on measures taken in European countries like Germany, the Netherlands and the UK that supported the resumption of festivals and live events over the northern summer.
At the Senate committee inquiry into the Live Performance Federal Insurance Guarantee Fund Bill 2021 held in mid-October, John Watson, an Ambassador for APRA AMCOS and artist agent, argued the sector required a national policy to support reopening.
“The problem that we have is that those risks are uninsurable risks, so there’s a market failure at the moment because you can’t buy insurance against a COVID cancellation and you can’t buy insurance against a closed border,” Watson said.
Dean Ormston, chief executive of APRA AMCOS, the peak live music body, said that without a clear plan to ensure the sector was protected against future uncertainty, many tour operators would be likely to weigh against the risks of cancellation for international acts and large scale festivals.
“There’s no clear plan to ensure that our sector’s workers are going to be supported through this enforced hibernation,” Ormston said.
A vaccination rate of 80% is “no magic bullet” for the live music sector, Ormston said, because successful tours require artists, crews and attendees to cross state borders.
And while at this point most businesses in the economy are now “able to plan with some certainty what reopening looks like, what resourcing they’ll need, and how sales might track and revenue build,” a number of factors are keeping the live music sector treading water.
“Artists and music industry workers have to wait until venues can operate at capacity and then decide that they’ll engage musicians,” Ormston said.
“Artists and music industry workers also have to wait for premiers and chief ministers to reopen borders with some certainty before taking on the risk of organising a tour.”
Costs of a dormant sector
The live music industry was running at under 10% of pre-COVID-19 activity, according to the most recent APRA AMCOS data. This 10% represents a sliver of the approximately $1.4 billion Australians have traditionally spent on live music.
Brant said on a practical level the costs to the industry are around the lag in its ability to fully resume operations along with the rest of the economy.
“The second half of this year is “incredibly busy from an international perspective,” Brant said.
But a combination of the hollowing out of the sector — a vast number of workers left the industry over the over 18 months since it essentially shut down — and the amount of time needed to actually pull together the logistics for an event, mean the risks around bringing back live entertainment remain.
Brant also tallied the ongoing costs associated with cancelled events, giving the example of a tour that was cancelled mid-year due to lockdowns that was slated to play at six theatres around the country to audiences of around 800-1,200 people.
“If the tour had sold out, Frontier would have made around $20,000, however the cancellation costs topped out at around $75,0000,” he said.
“We’re opening up at a really rapid pace,” Brant said, citing the recent event for 4,000 people in Melbourne that came together “within two weeks.”
He said if the sector had been considered in terms of flagging what the possibilities for public events might look like, “we could have had international events back in the market by March or April.”
“We could have planned a bit better.”
“We are now in a situation where there’ll be few if any international [artists] in the market until at least March next year.”
“It would have been good if we’d had some signalling as to where our sector was going to get to earlier so we could plan.”
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