Live Nation’s dominance of the live music market is in the political spotlight in Australia, with performer representatives calling for the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission to investigate allegations of anticompetitive behaviour.
Representatives from the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance told a parliamentary inquiry looking into the Australian live industry that musicians were losing out because of the “Amazonification” of the sector, where a small number of major players control most aspects of live performance, including shows, festivals, venues and ticketing.
According to The Guardian, Lilia Anderson, a researcher for the Alliance, said, “It’s not an accident that musicians are struggling to make a living in Australia and one of the key reasons that’s driving that is that, over the past few decades, a group of just three major companies has come to control an estimated 85% of the Australian live music market". Those three players are TEG, AEG-Frontier and, of course, Live Nation.
“For those companies, as opposed to musicians, live music is a very lucrative business model”, Anderson added. “Live Nation has made a net profit of over $55 million in the last financial year alone”. The corporates are achieving that success, she went on, through “a kind of Amazonification of live music”. For example, “Live Nation not only controls ticketing, but festivals, music agencies and, increasingly, music venues”.
The Alliance’s President for musicians, Kimberley Wheeler, said that - for performers - the live sector is “characterised by low rates of pay, inconsistent work, delayed payments, wage theft, lack of superannuation and the widespread expectation that musicians will play unpaid gigs in return for ‘exposure’”. And while none of those issues are new, the increasing dominance of a small number of major players has made things worse, reducing the bargaining power of artists.
“We’ve had some artists reporting exclusivity clauses in their contracts that prohibit them from playing other gigs around the time of a festival performance, for example”, Wheeler explained. “This has left several bands in the lurch where festivals have been cancelled and we are calling for these anti-competitive clauses to be scrapped”.
The dominance of Live Nation is also in the political spotlight in the US, where the government’s Department Of Justice has begun legal proceedings following an investigation into allegations of anticompetitive conduct. The Alliance wants the competition regulator in Australia to likewise investigate the sector.
Wheeler continued, “We need the government to investigate the level of power and control of these large corporations and the competitiveness of the live music industry and start addressing the structural problems”. That includes, she added, “the concentration of live music venues, agencies, and ticketing in the hands of large multinationals, and the systemic exploitation of Australian artists and performers”.