Australia’s union for performing artists has accused the world’s largest live entertainment company of anti-competitive behaviour and called for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to investigate the industry.
US-based multinational Live Nation became the focus of a parliamentary inquiry into the struggling live music sector on Friday, after previous public hearings identified sluggish recovery from Covid-19, rising insurance costs and changing audience habits as the causes behind the cancellation of dozens of music festivals over the past two years.
The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance told the inquiry on Friday the Australian live music industry had fallen victim to “Amazonification” by Live Nation and its main competitor TEG, through vertical integration business models that allow large corporations to control venues, ticket sales, merchandise and the artists themselves.
“This industry has always been about control and in particular control of artists and access and distribution,” the president of MEAA Musicians, Kimberley Wheeler, said.
“But the difference in the past was that those controlling interests were at least based here and had some sort of connection to our society and our social fabric. It wasn’t necessarily great for artists then, but when you introduce the sort of faceless international corporations that are now taking hold, it’s amplified the financial pressures.”
The MEAA campaigns director Paul Davies said despite music being by far the most profitable sector in the performing arts, the artists and crew working in the industry had become reliant on government grants and charitable organisations such as Support Act to eke out a living.
On average, a musician in Australia now earns just $6,000 a year, Davies told the inquiry.
“The industry is manifestly one of dominant corporate power, which has a detrimental effect the industry as a whole,” he said.
The Guardian has revealed that the federal and state governments had given more than $22m to Live Nation over the past four years, including $8m to stage two Coldplay concerts in Perth last year.
Singer Jessica Cerro, who performs as Montaigne, told the inquiry that despite winning an Aria award, being nominated for a Grammy and achieving a platinum single, they had barely earned any money from their music over the past decade.
“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,” the MEAA researcher Lilia Anderson told the inquiry.
“For those companies, as opposed to musicians, live music is a very lucrative business model … Live Nation has made a net profit of over [US]$55m in the last financial year alone.
“And it’s largely done that through a kind of Amazonification of live music … Live Nation not only controls ticketing, but festivals, music agencies and, increasingly, music venues. What that does is give them unprecedented power over musicians and their audiences.”
The MEAA told the inquiry an ACCC investigation into alleged anti-competitive behaviour in the music sector was needed, as was now happening in the US where the Department of Justice and 30 state and district attorneys general have launched a civil antitrust lawsuit.
The US lawsuit alleges Live Nation relied on “unlawful, anticompetitive conduct” to exercise monopolistic control over the live events industry, at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters and venue operators.
A separation of Live Nation’s venue, ticketing and concert promotion businesses is now on the cards in the US.
At a hearing earlier this month, the ACCC told the inquiry it was following the US lawsuit closely and acknowledged there was “some consistency in behaviours” exercised by Live Nation in Australia that were now the subject of the lawsuit in the US.
The Guardian has previously requested comment from Live Nation Australia on the allegations raised at the parliamentary hearing on Friday, but not received a response.
In statements posted on its website, Live Nation has said the US lawsuit will do nothing to reduce ticket prices and service fees for concerts, that its net profits proved it did not wield monopoly power and there was more competition than ever in the live music industry.
