As the countdown for 2023 looms large above us, it’s time to reflect on the year that’s transpired. And it’s been a very chaotic year for music.

First, we started with the roller coaster which was the December COVID wave. Aussies suffered overnight COVID test waits, with merry holiday-makers forced to do pre-vacay tests, alongside thousands of actually sick people. The effects on the music industry were devastating because large swathes of the population either had COVID or were isolating while waiting for test results. Some live events recorded attendances as low as 15% despite selling out, missing out on lucrative bar and merch sales. Both local and international artists had to pull out, even if just one member of the band was unwell. And there were horror stories of poorly run festivals due to being wildly understaffed at the last minute.

Deep breath.

We got out of that ditch after a few hellish months. Everyone seemed to have caught COVID and we were feeling pretty positive. But then mid-year came news both locally and overseas about big-name, legacy festivals with highly publicised logistical nightmares. I have a few theories about what happened, but this write-up by Stereogum sums it up more eloquently than I ever could.

Once festivals seemed to get their shit together, we then faced a new issue: intense competition due to market saturation. The sheer amount of events in the market (partly due to a backlog of rescheduled events) meant that punters now have a plethora of choices when it comes to entertainment. Where does this leave us? Weak ticket sales despite marketing budgets being at an all-time high.

So here are my top learnings that I’ll be taking into my marketing campaigns for 2023.

• Pace out your budget so you have decent cash left for the run-home phase. Or even better - have a contingency budget that can be used in emergencies like rescheduling, lineup changes, competing events, PR crises or just plain ole low ticket sales.

• Overemphasise your campaign launch and run home. Don’t stress about the middle phase. You’ll get more results for the same $1 you spend at the campaign’s bookends, versus the quiet phase in the middle. In order words, spend $1K at launch and you might get 200 ticket transactions. Spend that same money in the middle of the campaign when there’s nothing new happening and you’d likely get around 20 sales. (And then your stakeholders will start to panic and put pressure on you.)

• EDMs continue to be the strongest conversion driver. Work hard and strategically to secure emails of your most likely audience, and be clever about how you communicate with them.

• Don’t rely on platform attribution. It’s shit. (If you don’t what I’m talking about, I mean don’t freak when Meta/TikTok/Google/whatever reports low website sales.) Instead, benchmark against IRL sales. Use platform attribution to help with in-platform optimisation to compare campaigns, targeting and creative. And for the love of all things that are good, please share your ticket sales with your marketing team otherwise we’re flying blind.

• Selling points are cute, but don’t forget to openly discuss and mitigate your sales detractors. Your lineup might sell tickets, but not addressing poor logistics or how punters will need to travel to your new venue might stop people from buying tickets. The punter of 2023 will be very weary. (I might write a whole blog post about this because selling points and sales detractors are related but not diametrically opposed.)

So there you have it. Happy new year, and I look forward to navigating this crazy market with y’all next year. xx