Australian music industry queries the double standards of COVID crowd capacity limits
Australian Live Music Business Council launches national ‘gig-ready dashboard’ to help music industry workers navigate the morass of rules in our Covid-safe climate.
Having played concerts in most capital cities in the past few months, Sydney indie pop duo Lime Cordiale has grown accustomed to navigating the morass of different sets of rules for live music enforced by various state health departments, each of which comes at a cost.
“It’s pretty nerve-racking,” said Oli Leimbach, who co-founded the group with his brother Louis. “There’s just more costs in general because of COVID. It doesn’t really make sense to be playing venues at 50 per cent capacity, from a financial point of view.”
Lime Cordiale’s recent indoor shows in Perth and Sydney – both before audiences of more than 1000 people – were subject to caps on crowd capacity, which differ depending on whether tickets are sold as seated or standing.
“At the moment, it does feel like a huge tease: these last two weeks we’ve really appreciated it, but we’re still sceptical,” said Leimbach. “You don’t want to get your hopes up.”
To help music industry workers plot interstate tours, the Australian Live Music Business Council (ALMBC) on Monday launched a national “gig-ready dashboard”, an online tool that allows easy comparison of the differing requirements to hold concerts across the country.
“It’s still nightmarish in trying to do your job,” said ALMBC chair Stephen Wade. “I understand that a lot of people have had to go through enormous change because of this, but I’ve done this job for 25 years and it’s now almost like starting again from scratch.”
Wade is also the chief executive of booking agency Select Music, which represents more than 150 artists including Amy Shark, Baker Boy and Tim Finn.
In Melbourne, for instance, tickets to seated theatres can be sold to 75 per cent capacity, where up to 5,000 fans might stand up and dance in their seats.
Yet indoor unseated gigs must “not feature behaviours that present a greater COVID risk (singing, dancing, chanting or consumption of alcohol),” according to Victorian health guidelines collated under the ALMBC dashboard.
“I would love to see the facts – the evidence – that backs up why health departments don’t feel that we can do that in our industry,” said Wade.
At the beginning of the NRL season earlier this month, Wade went to the first Sydney Roosters game at the SCG, then found himself shoulder-to-shoulder with about 15,000 people for a kilometre as football fans exited the venue together.
As for why that sort of close-contact situation after a sporting match is judged differently than the crowds that gather before, during and after a concert, Wade and his colleagues are at a loss.
“The messaging throughout the live music industry that’s coming back to our venues is not clear and concise,” he said. “I just would like to think in our society, with everything else that we’ve done here in Australia, that we could at least get that right.”
“This is not people just having a whinge or wanting to bash the government or health departments,” said Wade. “It’s actually saying – really proactively, positively and maturely – just be upfront with us. Let us get back to work.”
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