I’ve always been in awe of the power of music to bring people together.
A country kid, I moved to the city in my early twenties and joined heavy metal band Boxmonster. Standing on stage at some of Melbourne’s best live music venues of the time – the Espy, Punters Club and Evelyn Hotel – I loved watching audience members soak up the performance. Neither they or I could imagine wanting to be anywhere else.
But I’ll never forget the moment I realised the music industry was broken.
It was the mid-1990s, I was booked to play a gig at a pub on the same night as a popular community festival. My band and I performed only to be handed a cheque for a fraction of the agreed fee.
The mic dropped. As working musicians, we were effectively powerless. There was no option but to accept the payment.
In 2018, I helped found Musicians Australia, a union for working musicians as part of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA).
Last month, I stood before a parliamentary hearing with colleagues from MEAA – including singer-songwriter Montaigne – to give evidence about how the industry is stacked against working artists.
The music industry happens to be the most profitable in the entertainment sphere. Yet around half of Australia’s working musicians earned less than $6000 last year, which is a mere 15 per cent of the national minimum wage, forcing most to look for work elsewhere.
A major part of the problem is that around 85 per cent of Australia’s live music sector is controlled by three companies – all foreign-owned multinational giants.
One of them, the Saudi-backed concert promoter Live Nation, has spent the past two decades acquiring businesses across the spectrum of the supply chain, including ticketing (Ticketmaster, Moshtix), festivals (Falls Festival, Splendour in the Grass), venues (the Fortitude Music Hall, Henley Street Music Hall) and agencies.
This vertical integration of the live music market in Australia has given the company, which raked in a net profit of US$563 million last financial year, unprecedented power and control.
Admittedly, this industry has always been about control; particularly control of artists, access and distribution.
The difference in the past was that those controlling interests were based in Australia and had connections with our society and social fabric. The introduction of, and domination by, faceless international corporations has created an outright cutthroat industry in which making a living as a working artist is harder than ever.
Authorities in the United States have woken up, with the US Justice Department currently suing Live Nation for alleged anti-competitive behaviour. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) appears to be watching closely; at an inquiry into challenges faced by the music industry, Scott Gregson, chief executive of the ACCC said, “We do see some consistency in behaviours that are part of that DOJ investigation and action with the type of things we hear in Australia.”
I have high hopes that the ACCC will announce an investigation into the local music market. It won’t solve all our problems, but it will help level the playing field.
We also need a proper industry plan for live performance that includes minimum rates of pay for musicians and performers, with a threshold of $250 per person, per gig. And the federal government must extend the scope of the Closing the Loopholes Bill to incorporate the original gig-economy workers: musicians.
We have to do more to keep musicians working. Without them, there is no industry.
