A very belated BIGSOUND recap

BIGSOUND this year was pretty special. It's been three years since we collectively converged in the valley, and it felt like we hadn't skipped a beat. But it wasn't quite the same. It's been a weird three years, and there were lots of meaty conversations about the state of the industry and the future of the music business. Here are my takes on the current market.

(And totally acknowledge that this is somehow two whole months late, because I got my usual BIGSOUND Bug™️ and then blinked and it was November.)

Young audiences are attending live music less

Being a diehard music fan has been a young person's game, historically. From teen girls fainting at The Beatles to adolescents filling arenas to see Billy Eilish, each decade's youth are the ones driving music revenue. But Kate Duncan, CEO of The Push, moderated a panel about future audiences at BIGSOUND and raised a worrying statistic about how young audiences are indeed attending live music less than previous generations.

The very obvious reason here is that kids who are 16 to 21-years-old in 2022 missed out on live music as a rite of passage. Pre COVID, teens got dragged to their first live music event via a slightly older mate or sibling. Young people may also have a skewed view of what a festival is like via (perhaps blown-out-of-proportion) context of recent teething issues at festivals like Splendour and Glasto. Trainwreck charting on Netflix's top 10 in Australia also didn’t help paint a flattering picture.

Secondly, this might actually be a symptom of widespread talent leakage across the sector during COVID. In 2020, many music industry professionals moved to safer pastures to pay the rent. Internship opportunities came to a halt because businesses were either figuring out the remote working situation, didn't have enough projects for interns to work across, or worse, redundancies meant that there weren't staff to mentor interns.

Fast forward to 2022, and we're missing several years of emerging talent joining our ranks. This definitely programmers and bookers. My controversial take here is that perhaps millennials and Gen Xers aren't booking lineups that appeal to Gen Z. We need to support actual Gen Z bookers who have a finger on the pulse to help book events for their age group. (Refreshing my inbox to wait for the hate mail to come in.)

Why is the market so saturated right now and when will that change

Another big topic at BIGSOUND centred around oversaturation with live events in Australia. Firstly, we're working through a backlog of literally years of rescheduled shows, in addition to new events. Add to this bloated marketing timelines for annual festivals, with many announcing months earlier. This means more events, and critically more events in market at the one time. Bolster and Tixel released an in-depth report on the state of events/ticketing this year that including some hard stats about when is too far out to put your event on sale. (More on that delicious report in a future blog.)

I suspect the market will reset in late 2023 or early 2024 once marketing cycles return to normal timelines and the backlog of tour commitments have been fulfilled.

The marketing shouldn't stop when the ticket is sold

On the flip side, a trend that has staying power as we exit this pandemic will be consumer's desire for flexibility. Tixel's Jason Webb shared this brilliant perspective during our panel: You might think twice about purchasing shoes online if you knew you couldn't return them, and it's frankly the same for tickets.

Music audiences no longer see purchasing a ticket as a commitment, it's a maybe, very casually floating in their Google Calendar. When we all invariably got sick with COVID, the onus was put onto us to resell our own tickets, and now it's an ingrained behaviour when we need to rehome event tickets for whatever reason. Longer timelines have led to some forgetting about events point blank because they were rescheduled ad nauseam. #softlife culture has also made it normal and okay to just cancel on events the day of because #selfcare, with some being okay on losing the price of the ticket because their wellbeing came first.

Recall bias means that for the past few months the terrible festival coverage in the media combined with long campaign periods (every day is a chance to change your mind) means that ticket conversions are not guaranteed. We need to keep engaging with ticket holders via organic and paid marketing to keep them hyped for the upcoming event. Bonus points if this leads to WOM ticket sales to their networks.

Let your resales run free

So what if you don't keep audiences excited and they decide to not attend?

I had a great chat over beers with the wider Tixel team about their opinions around resale tactics and whether an always-on versus ring fenced method works best. The overwhelming consensus was not to to have a small window for resales but to turn on your resale facility when appropriate earlier on in the campaign, say a few weeks after you've sold out or after your first big burst of activity is wrapped up.

Having a small resale window might have its (limited) benefits, but you run the huge risk of supply and demand issues. This method can see a huge influx of tickets going up for sale as soon as it opens, and if demand is low than you'll end up with lots of second hand tickets up for grabs, a huge group of salty ticket holders who can’t get rid of tickets they don’t need (and potentially ruining their brand sentiment and chances they’ll come next year) and people probably purchasing discounted resale tickets over full price tickets. However - you also need to make sure the demand is also there which can be hard because this only peaks right before an event. You also miss out on capturing purchases from users thinking of attending on a whim, but might forget to check back when the resale opens or might have made other plans while waiting for them to be available.

I'm still on the fence about how to align this with your primary ticket sale marketing campaign, although ring fenced resales can just as easily undo your hard work with primary ticket sales in a fell swoop anyway and can be a PR nightmare if tickets are still on the market.

Changing tides with resale facilities

I was among one of two hundred thousand (ish) Aussies who got the spicy cough in December, and offloaded my Sun Cycle NYD tickets at shocking 30% of face value. I felt a bit salty about it and definitely held back on purchasing tickets to events for a large part of this year until the week or day of to make sure I would be able to attend. This was definitely a market trend - where we were seeing highly exaggerated late buying behaviours for events.

But I've been increasingly finding that the events that I do actually want to attend are starting to sell out with huge waitlists on Tixel and have gotten incredible FOMO from missing out. This is conjecture and not backed by any data, but my crystal ball tells me that as punters start to miss out on events like this a handful of times, they're going to start weighing up the risk of missing out vs potentially getting COVID, and start buying earlier for the 2022 summer season.

Meredith: Special case or case study

Aunty Meredith sure is the poster child of the festival sector. Meredith 2022 has sold out in record time, and well before GP tickets even went on sale. Scoring a Meredith ballot this year definitely did not guarantee a ticket.

Other festivals are now questioning whether to switch from the typical presale mechanic to a Meredith style ballot to create hype. My take here though is that Meredith didn't solely sell out because they used a ballot. Sure - the ballot is a great word-of-mouth tool to drive organic conversations about the event and create some hype, but you have to remember that these are festival pros who run a very tight ship. They deliver a world-class event year after year. They attract a cashed up, well-behaved, festival-trained audience. They curate magical lineups. They decided to sit out for a few years too instead of presenting a half baked ‘COVID lite’ version of their event. I'm certain that if they ever ran a year bogged with issues (unlikely), their sales the following year would suffer.

I would only recommend switching to ballots for events that actually have a chance of selling out within a week with an existing established audience, otherwise you're just trying to create hype where there is none to no one.

Know your levers at every moment

Talking about presales going out of fashion, we also discussed whether presales help or harm ticket sales.

The thinking is that while offering a discount during launch is helpful (this is backed by Bolster research), we have also seen negative sentiment about tiered ticket prices later in campaigns. Anchoring is a cognitive bias where one stimulus tempers of feelings of another stimulus. In the case of ticket sales, a late buyer might be about to purchase a third release ticket but get totally put off by seeing the SOLD OUT allocation for early bird tickets with a much cheaper price tag and feeling like their paying more money for no reason.

It's important to understand that audiences who purchase at different points in a campaign have very different levers to purchase. Someone buying early is usually worried they'll miss out on tickets or want to save money with an early bird price. People who buy right before an event are usually fence sitters and driven by the fact that an event is around the corner, and not so price conscious (or they would've purchased during presales). The solution here is to lean into the lever for each phase. Showcase how much punters are saving by purchasing an earlybird ticket, and remove any mention of the earlier prices but focus on urgency during the run home campaign, if your ticketing provider allows.

Might seem counter intuitive that if they're not price conscious then they shouldn't care about the price factor, but it's also key to remember that purchase levers operate on a different plane to purchase barriers. A blog post for another day.

Festivals aren't just competing with each other

This gem of an insight came from Rich Moffat. We've been blaming an oversaturated market paired with consumer hesitancy for weak sales, but it's we're also vying for the same consumer spend with the travel industry. International travel has returned to normal, and Aussies like travel. Would a 20-year-old be interested in paying $400 for a camping festival ticket + $300 extra for transport, food, drugs (oh heavens) and their festival ‘fit? Or would they rather drop that cash on a trip to Bali for a week? We need to think bigger picture when it comes to competitors.

Don't forget about what it's all about

It's very easy to forget about how artists play in the equation here, when we're busy thinking of promoters, audiences and ticketing providers. But at the core it is and has always been about the artists. If there is no music than there is no industry.

It's frankly been a fucked few years and we need to support artists to continuing creating music.

On that note - my BIGSOUND artist highlights were Forest Claudette, COLLAR and Full Flower Moon Band. Over and out until next September.