Sam Hawley: Oasis is coming to Australia, but many fans will have already accepted they either won't manage to get a ticket, or if they do it's going to cost a lot of money. So what goes on behind the scenes with the big ticketing companies in control of our live music? Today, Avani Dias on her Four Corners investigation into dynamic pricing and how Australian artists are allegedly being ripped off. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal Land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
Sam Hawley: Avani, if you're an Oasis fan, this is a pretty exciting time because they're coming to Australia, of course, and tickets are on sale from today. But, well, you know, getting one, that's going to be pretty tough.
Avani Dias: Yeah, look, I've been an Oasis fan for a long time too. And, you know, they obviously, the brothers, the Gallagher brothers, they had this big public spat, they broke up and the fact that they've come back together after 15 years, it's a really big deal around the world. So people are really, really excited about the fact that this is happening. But when I started looking more into the fact that this band has come together and they're putting on this giant, very profitable tour. It came out that this company that's putting on the tour and the ticketing company behind it, there's actually a lot more to it. And, you know, so far Oasis has sold out its shows all across the world, the ones that it's announced. But they've been pretty controversial and the company running it has come under a lot of fire.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so that company is Live Nation. It's a US company. So let's get to that in a minute. But we saw in the UK, of course, when the Oasis tickets went on sale there, absolute outrage. Because what was happening was when people were in the virtual queue to get these tickets, which are like gold, the price of them was going up and up in front of their eyes. Just tell me what was going on.
Avani Dias: Yeah, so Sam, some people were buying tickets that were double the price of what was originally advertised.
Avani Dias: This concept of dynamic pricing, it kind of works like rideshare companies, right? When you're in a busy area waiting for an Uber and the price goes up, that's called surge pricing. It works with an algorithm. And the company has told us it is a similar concept but doesn't actually use an algorithm. It's actually real people working real time to put up those prices based on the demand. Oasis came out and said, look, we didn't set those ticket prices. That wasn't up to us. It was actually up to our promoters, so Live Nation and their artist teams. And then Live Nation and Ticketmaster came back and said, no, it was the band. There's this kind of he said, she said over who sets the price and why we as fans are actually paying more in these scenarios. And when you buy a ticket as a fan, you do assume all that money goes to the artist. But we've spoken to so many different artists. We've seen ticket breakdowns, which show that's not the case. It's not all going to the artist.
Sam Hawley: Hmm. Well, since the outrage overseas, dynamic pricing will not be happening here in Australia with those Oasis tickets. So that's a good thing. But let's then delve Avani more into Live Nation and Ticketmaster. As we said, that's a US company. Just explain its business model for me.
Avani Dias: Yeah, so Live Nation, it's merged with this company Ticketmaster, which a lot of listeners would have heard of. And they've effectively become the one company now. And Live Nation is the promoter of a show. So it does things like organise venues, the finances behind a show, the ticketing. It does a lot of that kind of admin work, the marketing. And then Ticketmaster, the company, does the obvious ticketing work, right? But what we found in Australia, it's discreetly buying up all these small live music businesses. So it owns Mosh Tix, another ticketing company. It owns a booking agency that basically puts on gigs and organises gigs for some of the most high-profile artists in the country like Bernard Fanning and G Flip. That company is called Village Sounds. It owns festivals like Splendour in the Grass, Falls Festival. It owns a band merch company. And it's bought up these businesses in a really quick succession. It doesn't actually say that these are Live Nation businesses. It owns venues across the country in regional areas. For example, in Wollongong, it's recently bought Anita's Theatre. It operates the Palais Theatre in Melbourne. So it's increasing its stake in the venue sphere as well. So by having its finger in every pie of the live music industry, it means that this company can get bands to sign on to these contracts where they're kind of left in the dark about where their money's going.
Sam Hawley: We also know, Avani, that last year Live Nation made $23 billion worldwide in profit. So that's huge, huge money. You spoke to Paul Sloan. He's one of Australia's top booking agencies. So he helps big artists organise live gigs. And he's seriously worried, isn't he?
Avani Dias: Yeah, so Paul Sloan, he works with big-name artists in Australia. And he is really speaking out and saying the fact that Live Nation has this sort of ownership model and it has ownership of venues, ticketing and so on, that means that artists are being exploited. And his real concern is about where this is all going and what it actually means for consumers.
Paul Sloan, Music booking agent: They're operating at such scale that it's difficult to avoid them, which does, I think, obviously cause disruption inside the business, you know, the lack of choice.
Avani Dias: He's been asking the company, what's happening to this money when consumers pay for tickets? And he's really struggling to get answers.
Paul Sloan, Music booking agent: It's 100% of the income for the show is pretty much staying within the walls of the company in some way.
Avani Dias: Then we spoke to artists. Adelaide band Bad Dreems, they're a four-piece rock band, and they're on the sort of middle scale, right? They're selling shows in the sort of 800 to 1,000 bracket. So they're not the big stadium shows or anything like that. They played at some Live Nation venues. The tickets were sold through Live Nation's ticketing, mosh ticks. And then they found that there was also a merch cut. So the merchandise that they were selling at the gig, there was a cut of those proceeds that was also disappearing. And then they found that there was also a venue fee, so a fee going to these Live Nation venues. And that tour, a big tour across the country, it grossed over $100,000. And then they looked at their statement, and they only got $9,000 back for a four-piece band for a national tour. They said the issue here is that because Live Nation has ownership of so many different companies, they just didn't know where this money was going, and they couldn't actually negotiate a deal that was good for them.
Alex Cameron, guitarist of Bad Dreems : There was a ticketing fee. Then there were venue fees to Live Nation-owned venues. And then those Live Nation-owned venues were also taking a merch cut of the merch we sold. And so we were paying four times to Live Nation, and we had no way of negotiating that. And in fact, when we raised it with our booking agent, they were just, they sort of shoulder shrug.
Avani Dias: Now Live Nation denies this. The company has said, well, look, the band is across the deal. They know what venues are being booked. They know what the ticketing is. They know what the deal is. But Bad Dreems has told us that's not the case, and they felt that they were really in the dark.
Alex Cameron, guitarist of Bad Dreems : You know, a few thousand dollars of merch fees is a pittance to Live Nation. It's a huge amount of money for a band like us. And it's very difficult to get answers or get alternative ways of doing things once you're intertwined in the industry.
Sam Hawley: And the thing is, Avani, Bad Dreems is a band that actually managed to get on a stage to perform, but really that's hard now in Australia, isn't it, because more than 1,300 live music venues have actually shut down in Australia. And now you've established as well that Live Nation is buying up all these venues where live music can actually be held.
Avani Dias: We spoke to one person, Mark David. He's from the UK. He's from a group called the Venues Trust UK, and it's working to save smaller venues. He actually, side note, put on one of Oasis's first gigs, which is pretty crazy.
Mark David, Venues Trust UK: It's frankly disgraceful that the biggest companies in the music industry are prepared to see small venues that get them that talent closing down. They should be ashamed of that. They need to be a call to account.
Avani Dias: Of those 34 venues where Oasis first played, how many are still open?
Mark David, Venues Trust UK: 11. 23 have closed in the last 30 years. Would they ever have become Oasis if they hadn't have played those 34 shows? You've got to be bad before you're good.
Avani Dias: And he actually says that Live Nation comes in at the profitability point. So that's around 1,000 to 1,500 people in a room. He says that's when it can actually make money for a company.
Mark David, Venues Trust UK: At 1,500 capacity, the ticket price and the number of people in the room will be sufficient to get you to a profitable live show. If there is nobody developing the talent from the ground up, expecting it to arrive at 1,500 capacity and be able to sell out on a reading, that seems a massive leap in the dark to me.
Avani Dias: Now, Live Nation has come back to us and said, well, look, we run programs to help developing artists. We put them as supports on these big international stadium tours. But a lot of people are saying, well, the company needs to do more to support that smaller end of the scale where every artist has to develop their craft in order to become the big time Taylor Swift or the Oasis.
Sam Hawley: So let's talk, Avani, about regulation. I mean, who's doing the checks and balances on all of this?
Avani Dias: Yeah, and look, it is worth noting that in Australia there are two other big companies. There's Frontier Touring, which ran Taylor Swift's gigs. There's TEG, which owns Ticketek as well. But in terms of regulation, I spoke to artists, big name artists like Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, and he actually said the government needs to step in here. This industry has been allowed to operate freely. Businesses have been able to do what they want, and that's resulting in artists getting exploited.
Peter Garrett, singer of Midnight Oil: They are not accountable in our country. They are hardly regulated. They are quite often unethical. They have no loyalty to Australia or to Australian artists at all. They don't want to pay tax here, most of them, and they are basically calling the shots.
Avani Dias: And so I spoke to the arts minister, Tony Burke, and I wanted to know, is the government going to step in?
Tony Burke, Minister for the Arts: Yes, you can buy different parts of a supply chain. That's all true. But you can't then use that in an anti-competitive way. And increasingly, we are hearing those complaints from artists, from venues, from festivals.
Avani Dias: But when I asked him about regulation for ticketing on issues like dynamic pricing, which are really annoying customers, he said that the government isn't looking at doing anything in that space at the moment.
Tony Burke, Minister for the Arts: Surge pricing is something that as consumers, people have always dealt with. I don't love it, but I think we have to be realistic. It's always been there.
Avani Dias: Live Nation has come back to us with a really lengthy statement. We asked several times for an interview, but the company declined, and it sent a statement through its lawyers saying that Australia's live entertainment industry is really competitive. And the company said over and over again that its business model is similar to other players in Australia and around the world, that it's not doing anything different to those players.
Sam Hawley: Alright. So, Avani, if we don't do something, I guess just to level the playing field here, what is the future for live music in Australia, do you think?
Avani Dias: Well, what people have told us through this story is that we will have a live music industry where it's stadium shows and big superstars. And Peter Garrett put it really astutely. He said, because of the rise of streaming, because of the rise of Live Nation, we're not listening to Australian music anymore in the way that we used to.
Peter Garrett, singer of Midnight Oil: What makes us human in a way is artists sharing their sense of things, their stories, with the people who they've grown up with or who they live nearby or who they're visiting. And that's why people still go out to shows. A country without its own music is a country without a soul.
Avani Dias: And, you know, the concern by many in the industry is that by Live Nation making this an expensive luxury item that a lot of people can't afford, we're really threatening those grassroots traditions that have kept Australia seen so thriving and amazing.
Sam Hawley: Avani Dias is an investigative reporter with the ABC. You can watch her Four Corners report tonight on ABC TV at 8.30 or on iView. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead, Kara Jensen-Mackinnon and Sam Dunn. Audio production by Anna John. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.