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Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Wednesday, the tenth of April. I'm Sam, I'm Billy. Yesterday the National Arts Council, called Creative Australia, presented its landmark report into the state of Australia's music festivals and unfortunately it's not good news. Over a third of Australian music festivals lost money last year, losing almost eight hundred thousand dollars
on average. The cost of putting on a festival has rapidly increased, it's harder for festivals to get insurance, and people are buying tickets closer to the time of the festival now. Creative Australia said impacts from the pandemic have seen many popular festivals canceled or downscaled, resulting in multimillion dollar losses for organizers and promoters. In today's podcast, we're
going to talk to Mitch Wilson. They're the managing director of the Australian Festivals Association and was at the launch of the report yesterday. Before we get to that chat, Billy, what is making headlines this morning?
The Northern Territory government has extended a curfew for young people in Alice Springs by an additional six days. It comes after an initial two week curfew for under eighteen year olds in the region was announced last month and mid concerns about growing violence and unrest. It will now continue until six am Tuesday, sixteenth of April, meaning the
curfew will cover the entire school holiday period. And we have done a podcast on that, so if you want more information about that, we will link it in the show notes.
A new report has found job seeker payments are not high enough to cover living expenses. Data from Anglicare Australia shows low income households are worst affected by inflation. It said more than seventy percent of spending by the bottom fifth of income earners in twenty five twenty three was on essential items. Anglicare said Senselink payments were far too low.
Last month was the world's hottest March on record. According to the European Union's Climate Change Service. It marks the tenth consecutive month of record breaking temperatures. March was one point sixty eight degrees warmer than estimated pre industrial temperatures. The global average temperature for the twelve months leading up to March was also at its highest on record.
And today's good news, Beyonce has become the first black woman to take the number one spot in the country charts for her album Cowboy Krter. It's also her eighth album to top the overall Billboard two hundred album charts. The singer has also sold the most vinyls of her career so far, with sixty two thousand Cowboy Carter vinyl copies sold in the first week of the album's release.
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Sam. Before we get into this chat, I think it would be helpful for the listeners to know that you absolutely love music festivals. You go to one probably once a month.
Why is that, Billy? I absolutely love them and they've been some of the most special times for me over the years. You know, I've discovered new artists, I've discovered new parts of Australia. It's the best and I know a lot of young people feel the same way. But there's a lot of really serious issues facing the music festival industry and that's why this chat with Mitch was so important to have on the podcast. The new report came out yesterday, I broke it down with Mitch. Here's
that chat, Mitch. Thanks for joining us on the Daily OS. The report's just come out. Tell me where you are, how you're feeling, and what your days look like today.
I am in Sydney. It's extremely wet and indicative of sort of I think how a number of people in the music industry have been feeling a bit disheveled, a bit all over the place. But yeah, I think the report is extremely helpful for us to be able to quantify map this music festival sector in the country because
we haven't had a national piece of research before. We've been advocating for this and managed to get it in the National Cultural Policy, which we were super excited to see, and I think it's getting released at the most optimal time. So we see it as the basis for even more research into music festivals across the country, and super excited to have it out there and to hear everyone's reactions and for you to all see it.
I want to start with a bit of a philosophical question for you. Why are music festivals so important?
Oh? I think music festivals are hugely important. Everyone loves hanging out with their mates, going away together, you know, get out of town, switch off, particularly these days, and enjoy some music. I think, you know, out of all the art forms that people engage with, music as the highest, so it's unsurprising that festivals are such a draw card for people in the past.
We're going to get to this a bit later in the discussion, but I kind of feel like it's the right place for this question. Is it important enough to a society that governments should be supporting them financially?
I think government definitely needs to be at the table at the moment. We've seen such huge impacts into music festivals these past few years. It's not just the pandemic and lockdowns. It was prior to that. We saw the Black Summer bushfires cancel a number of events. We've seen le Nina and wet weather impact events. Since then, we just haven't had the opportunity to really fully recover from
those ongoing impacts. And the economic impact and the benefits to communities, particularly in regional areas across the country are huge. And for similar industries that have those impacts, whether it's you know, mining, agriculture, that have as great a sort of economic impacts in some of these regional communities. For some reason, we're just not seen on the same you know pedestal and previously festivals and cross contemporary music haven't
really gone to government for support. It's only in these past few years that we've needed that support. And why we're asking for actually just time limited, short term funding to weather the immediate challenges which have been largely out of our control since the pandemic and you know, supply chain issues.
And those details were abundantly clear in yesterday's release of a report from Creative Australia. It's said that of the five hundred and thirty five music festivals in Australia in twenty two to twenty three, thirty five percent of them lost money. Is something happening on that supply side that's outweighing because people are still going to music festivals, right, so are they just becoming more expensive to produce?
Some of our festivals have had their highest attendance numbers on record, but they're making less and less money. And we've seen examples of some of our members events selling out the last six months and they didn't make any money because they're just covering costs. We've seen costs up thirty to forty percent on every single line item. When it comes to insurance, it's even greater than that.
I just want to jump in here because that's a little bit of kind of confusing industry speak, So let's go through that together. Basically, what Minch is talking about there is how much it costs music festivals to take out an insurance policy which they can then activate in
case something goes wrong. And as we've seen an increase in the number of festivals affected by wild weather or by some economic variable factors, the cost of getting that insurance has gone up, and it's gone up in some cases to such a high extent that it actually is becoming harder for music festivals to pay for the policy before they have the revenue from ticket sales.
And ticket prices just can't be raised at the same rate to meet those costs, So the margins are super tight, and you're seeing those examples of nearly having to sell out just to break either.
So why do you think then we're getting to a point where people don't want to spend more and more money on the experience because I think there's an understanding that the supply costs are going up. Are we hitting that ceiling of young people are just not going to fork out another one hundred dollars on top of the ticket price.
Well, like, we haven't seen ticket prices go up as much as the costs have gone up. I just want to make that clear up front. But yeah, I think cost of living pressures are hitting everyone and renting increases, particularly amongst young people. I think the data out of the report that we find most concerning is that the eighteen to twenty four year old age group is not the largest demographic when it comes to ticket purchases for
music vestvals anymore. They consistently have been, and we're now seeing them drop down below the twenty five to twenty nine year old age group, and that has a huge flow on effect to that ongoing platline of an audience and also locking in music lovers from you know, when they're sort of finishing school and able to go to live music, to be live music and festival attendees for decades after that.
Is there an argument to be made though, that just the habits and trends amongst that eighteen to twenty four year old cohort have changed and moved away from festivals and towards the Taylor Swifts, the fread Again's the kind of megators.
Well, I think from an artist's perspective, we're seeing a lot of those big name headline artists see that a stadium show or arena show just for themselves is more of a financial incentive and that's having a flow on effect of festival lineups. And I think, yeah, we don't fully understand the changes in what young people are looking for from their life music experiences at the moment. I think there's a lot of impacts from COVID times lockdown.
A lot of you know, eighteen to twenty four year olds we're talking about finishing high school, starting UNI in lockdown on Zoom, not going to these sort of formative cultural experiences, going away with your mates for a weekend, and I think the costs are also having an impact where anecdotally hearing that as much as Taylor's with costs, it's actually, you know, less of a cost than some of the multi day music festivals, but you're getting one artist or two with the support rather than in some
cases hundreds.
So you're representing festivals when you go and have these discussions with government, and that's both on the state and a federal level. How's government receiving the requests of your industry.
Well, we had a big meeting with the federal government yesterday, so Creative Australia, the Arts Agency convened the meeting of festival promoters as well as US as the Peak Body. So I think the news of the cancelations and with this research coming out and the findings within that, there has been an understanding of the pressures. I think given the range of things we've discussed today, they're also trying to grapple with what the challenges are and what their
role might be. I think what was quite forcefully put by a number of festival organizers yesterday was that the federal government has a role to play in the insurance industry.
The Federal Government needs to be at the table when we're having discussions around changes to the insurance offerings to festivals, because there's essentially bordering on market collabse premiums are through the roof and it really keeps having a flow on impact to an organizer deciding whether or not, you know, if they don't get that huge ticket buying when they go on sale, whether they hold off and sort of take the risk of seeing whether they'll sell those tickets
before the event, or do they sort of pull the pin early because they know they might be up for in some places tens of millions of dollars in losses and if they don't have insurance, that obviously has a big impact on their decision making.
One more question from me, Mitch, you're in these rooms, many would argue you're talking on behalf of young Australians here trying to establish a future for the festival industry. What points are you finding resonate the best with government and with let's say, you know, it's not a nice way to say, but let's say people outside the target demographic of going to a festival. Is it the point
about how important these are economically for regional communities? For industry or is it what we started this discussion with about how important festivals are to the cultural fabric.
Both factors work for governments, and I think the combination of the two is literally what is convincing people. It's not just that you know, their formative experience for young people to enjoy time with their mates and you know their identity building they were for me. I think the cancelations have crystallized their potential loss of the benefits of the economic impacts on regional communities. I think it has
really sort of focused the minds of government. You know, the report released yesterday outlines five hundred and thirty five festivals across the country. It's a huge spread of events across the country that if we start to see more cancelations, it's going to have a huge one on effect. And I guess the other thing is it's not just about the audience of going to festivals, and it's not just
about our members the people putting on the events. We're seeing Australian artists struggle to make it in the globalized English speaking music market. They're fighting against you know, really powerful algorithms on streaming services and nobody sort of quite understood how to really get their break, and the importance of both radio and festivals for Australian artists is even larger because of that difficulty in making their break in
this sort of globalized music market. So I think we've seen a number of examples of Australian artists talking about, you know, the impact that getting on a stage enabled them to develop their audience here and actually give them, you know, a following that then they were able to use to get a record deal or to be able
to tour overseas. And I think that's the piece that we in the music industry like, We really see it as an ecosystem and if you see festivals falling over it could have a huge flow on impact to the broader Australian music industry and artists.
Mitche Wilson, thanks so much for joining us in the Daily Odds today.
Thank you so much for listening to today's podcast of the Daily Os. I thought that was an absolutely fascinating chat. If you would like to hear more from us, you can follow on Spotify or Apple. As well as getting it into your feet every morning, it also really helps the Daily Ods grow and helps new audiences find us thank you so much and we will be back tomorrow.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Adunda Bungelung Calcoton woman from Gadighl country.
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