Why are Coldplay, Zach Bryan, Christina Aguilera only playing in one Australian city each?
Behind the recent trend of major musical acts performing in a single Australian city are lucrative sweeteners and interstate competition. But for fans, already expensive concert tickets are turning into $2000 events. Is FIFO music here to stay?
A British rock band known for crafting joyous live spectacles, a platinum-selling US pop singer whose voice helped define the 2000s, and one of the hottest country musicians on the planet.
It’s not often that these three performers – Coldplay, Christina Aguilera and Zach Bryan, respectively – are mentioned in the same sentence, but they happen to be linked through a surprising and wildly successful business arrangement that has recently become part of the live music landscape.
This month, all three acts will perform in Australia, having been brought to our shores by some of the nation’s biggest concert promoters.
What’s unusual about this triumvirate, though, is that they’ll each perform in only one Australian city, thanks to lucrative sweeteners offered by state government departments charged with luring music-mad tourists interstate.
The trend kicked off last year, when another unlikely artistic trio in Foo Fighters, Bruno Mars and Billy Joel each touched down for concerts in a single city – Geelong, Sydney and Melbourne, respectively – before jetting off elsewhere.
For fans, news of these exclusive gigs can trigger simultaneous ecstasy and agony. Perhaps there’s a multisyllabic German word for the excruciating pain associated with opening your wallet to fly across the country because it’s the only chance you have to see your favourite act play live.
Such announcements also create something of a class divide among concertgoers, too. It’s one thing to buy a $200 ticket for a show in the city where you live; it’s another thing entirely when you’re weighing up a $2000 trip that takes in return airfares and accommodation.
Yet like it or not, based on Review’s interviews with live music industry executives at Frontier Touring, Live Nation, TEG and Untitled Group, this post-pandemic trend of stadium-filling FIFO performers – those “fly in, fly out” artist types who can earn hefty sums for a few hours’ work on stage – is here to stay.
On those occasions where artists’ calendars are tight, though, having an extra million dollars in your pocket – thanks to state tourism ministers attuned to the economic benefits of major music events – can help get the deal over the line.
Review understands that a seven-figure minimum is considered commonplace for such deals, but has been unable to confirm that figure, with many in the industry saying such fees are commercial in confidence. It follows that a major artist could expect to earn at least $1m on top of their usual fee for agreeing to play in one city only.
The history of popular music is built on pleasing the masses and giving the market what it wants. When the sun is shining on you, the smart money – particularly for younger acts – is to make hay by selling as many tickets in as many places as possible.
But in these one-off instances, compromise is the name of the game, for it’s an undeniably delicate business to preference one locale above all others.
When a major act announces it’ll play for one night only in a single city, it gambles on pissing off the majority of its Australian fanbase, who are unwilling – or unable – to splash megabucks on the experience.
As generally self-interested creatures, it can be hard to see the bigger picture – especially when you’re in Darwin, say, and weighing up whether you love Christina Aguilera enough to travel to see her first Australian performance in 16 years while calculating the financial hit during a cost-of-living crisis.
Such is the nature of acute music fandom, which can lead us to do crazy, expensive things to put our ears in the same space as the people who wrote and recorded our favourite songs.
Step back and look at a map of the globe, though, and consider our place within the Asia-Pacific region. Sometimes it’s a case of an artist hitting one market here, while time permits, rather than Australia missing out entirely.
If a global tour promoter has already booked a bunch of concert dates in Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia, then it’s much easier to add a single city in Western Australia into an existing run.
Which is precisely what led to this month’s itinerary for British rock quartet Coldplay, whose Music of the Spheres world tour includes November dates in Tokyo, Kaohsiung, Jakarta, Perth and Kuala Lumpur.
It’s an unusual set of cities to see in the same sentence, with the two dates at Perth’s Optus Stadium on November 18 and 19 comprising its entire Australian run.
After a two-month lay-off, Coldplay’s live itinerary – presented by Live Nation – will resume in mid-January at stadiums in the Philippines, Singapore and Bangkok.
Given the recent trend of quickfire turnarounds on major tours, such as former Beatle Paul McCartney – which went on sale in August, and began playing here in October – perhaps there’s scope for more Coldplay dates in the new year.
That approach was taken by American rock act Foo Fighters last year: its one-off concert at Geelong’s GMHBA Stadium became the springboard for a planned Australian tour nine months later, announced by Frontier Touring soon after the final chord of Everlong rang out.
Review was there in the coastal Victorian city among the crowd of about 30,000 people on that rainy, memorable night on March 4, 2022, which fired the starter’s gun on the return of international acts to our shores after we endured a two-year Covid pause.
Sadly, those planned dates were cancelled when drummer Taylor Hawkins died three weeks later. After the band mourned his loss, and released its emotive 11th album in June, Dave Grohl and co will soon return to our shores, starting November 29 in Perth.
When Bruno Mars played two shows in Sydney last October, it was a partnership between promoter TEG Dainty and the NSW government’s tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW, which booked the Uptown Funk star to open the city’s newest venue, Allianz Stadium.
And when Billy Joel played a one-off show at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on December 10, the Piano Man’s deal was done in conjunction with Frontier Touring and Always Live, an initiative created by the Victorian government to boost the state’s reputation for hosting major music events.
This month, the upcoming Christina Aguilera and Zach Bryan concerts will both be held under the Always Live banner at the 30,000 capacity Flemington Racecourse. (Tickets for Bryan’s gig sold out quickly; Aguilera has sold more than 90 per cent at the time of writing.)
These shows were secured by Untitled Group, a Melbourne-based independent promoter, with Bryan’s one-off appearance – which will mark the Australian live debut for the 27-year-old country artist from Oklahoma – struck in partnership with Unified Music Group.
According to Untitled Group, about 50 per cent of ticket buyers for these concerts will be arriving in Melbourne from interstate – a figure that is music to the ears of the team at Always Live, which is keenly interested in increasing visitation numbers for major events.
Similarly, Tourism WA figures supplied to Review show that, of the 134,000 tickets sold across the two Coldplay concerts in Perth, some 30 per cent – or about 40,000 of the audience – were bought by people who live outside of Western Australia.
Major event promoters partnering with state governments is nothing new: think of events like the Australian Grand Prix, the Australian Open tennis tournament, international sporting teams playing friendly matches, or the grand final games for the major football codes.
These are each based on commercial agreements stipulating geographic specifics: any rugby league fan knows the last game of the NRL season is traditionally held in Sydney, just as the AFL grand final is a lock at the MCG, notwithstanding deals signed during Covid border restrictions.
And in the festival space, promoters have spent decades clamouring to secure exclusive headliners that fans can only see at their event, from the Big Day Out in its prime in the 1990s and 2000s, to today’s travelling festivals such as Laneway, Good Things, Knotfest and Heaps Good, as well as site-specific events like Splendour in the Grass, Bluesfest, CMC Rocks QLD and Harvest Rock.
But since this is a relatively new phenomenon in the concert space, music fans are still coming to terms with the notion that someone of Billy Joel’s stature isn’t necessarily keen on a multi-city run, or that Taylor Swift’s schedule — booked a year or more in advance — means that she can only perform in Melbourne and Sydney on her current world tour.
A little history may help, however.
Not so long ago, Australia – and its smaller cousin, New Zealand – ran the risk of slipping off the global touring map entirely, because the cost of bringing major productions down here was often prohibitive, and the earning potential compared poorly to what a major act could earn playing more shows in the much bigger markets of Europe, the UK and North America.
More recently, thanks to the dedicated work of companies including Frontier, TEG, Live Nation and Untitled — and their various international partnerships — the Australia/New Zealand sector has become a strong touring market that’s often tackled in tandem, with artists commonly announcing a run of dates to play in the east coast capitals of both countries when itineraries permit.
Not always, however. It can be a tough pill for cash-strapped fans to swallow, but in a post-Covid phase when there’s probably more shows on the road than ever before, sometimes it’s a case of having one concert on our shores – or zero.
While researching and writing this article, I heard a few stories about the lengths people have gone to while attempting to scrape together the coins to see their favourite artist live.
When I outlined Coldplay’s exclusive Perth play, one friend was briefly outraged, then told the tale of his travails as a 15-year-old desperate to see Pearl Jam play in Brisbane circa 1995.
Faced with the task of finding $36 for a ticket, the boy turned entrepreneur, and set up a roadside stall in the Queensland heat, selling mangoes for a dollar apiece, complete with a handwritten sign that outlined his grunge desires.
With a little drive and a lot of luck, he sold a box of dodgy fruit, saw the show, had his mind blown by Eddie Vedder and co, and set in stone a love for all things Pearl Jam that continues today.
His tale of success chimed nicely in my ear, for a lot has changed in those 28 years, yet the song remains much the same: for many of us, it’s a case of too much music, too little money to spare.
A teenage Coldplay fan on the east coast might have needed to sell a few more mangoes in order to gain entry to Perth’s biggest stadium this weekend – but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Exclusives 2022:
March 4, 2022 – Foo Fighters @ GMHBA Stadium, Geelong (Frontier Touring, Always Live / VIC)
October 14-15, 2022 – Bruno Mars @ Allianz Stadium, Sydney (TEG Dainty / NSW)
December 10, 2022 – Billy Joel @ MCG, Melbourne (Frontier Touring, Always Live / VIC)
Exclusives 2023:
January 27, 2023 – Sam Smith @ d’Arenberg Cube, SA (Frontier Touring / SA)
November 18-19, 2023 – Coldplay @ Optus Stadium, Perth (Live Nation / WA)
November 25, 2023 – Christina Aguilera @ Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne (Untitled Group, Always Live / VIC)
December 8-10, 2023 – Eric Prydz @ Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne (Frontier Touring, Always Live / VIC)
December 9, 2023 – Zach Bryan @ Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne (Untitled Group/Unified, Always Live / VIC)
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