Why are all these international acts snubbing New Zealand?

Monday, 14 October 2024

From the Beatles, to Bowie, to Beyoncé, Aotearoa has hosted more than its share of music’s biggest stars. Following Taylor Swift ghosting us on the Eras tour, and Oasis’s apparent snub in September, however, some Kiwi live music fans are concerned we’ve been dumped by the stadium fillers.

In the next eight months, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Katy Perry, The Weeknd, The Killers, and even Green Day, are all bypassing New Zealand in favour of multi-night shows in Australia. Most of these artists have played in New Zealand before. This time, however, you’ll have to make like a Swiftie and cross the ditch if you want to catch any of them live.

Freelance music journalist Chris Schulz, who’s written extensively about this trend, reckons the Eras tour changed the formula for international touring in this part of the world.

“She showed that you don't have to tour every city and every stop to get to people. You can play bigger venues, multiple times, with 100,000 people coming and get people to come to you.”

He points to Billie Eilish, who has played Tuning Fork, Laneway, and a three-night residency at Spark Arena, as an example.

“There is someone who has come here […], and suddenly we're not on that list, we've been taken off it,” Schulz said. “If you look at Billie Eilish, and Olivia Rodrigo too, they're playing four nights each at these bigger arenas, between 15 and 22,000 people. They're following that Taylor Swift model and it shows.”

Part of the blame for us missing out could be down to gig infrastructure. In the halcyon days of stadium shows, 47,000 Kiwi fans crammed into Mt Smart to see Harry Styles; the same again to see Taylor Swift on her Reputations tour. Aotearoa’s biggest indoor arena, Spark, only holds around 12,000, while our biggest stadium, Eden Park, with a capacity of 50,000, can only host six shows a year.

The sense is that artists want fewer stops on their tours, but bigger shows with more people, at bigger venues. Added to that is the scale and cost of modern-day tours - SZA had an entire ship on stage at her April show in NZ; the stage design for Swift’s Era’s tour is estimated to have cost more than US$100 million to build and thousands to transport.

One industry insider, who didn’t want to be named, told us there was never a chance Swift would bring Eras here because we just don’t have a stadium that could have coped with the scale of the production, and we couldn’t have afforded to bring it here even if we did.

The cost of bringing global acts to such a small market is something other promoters tussled with.

'It's boring, but there is a recession in play,” Rhythm and Alps festival general manager Harry Gorringe said. “If you're an agent, or management, sitting in the UK or in LA, their entire job is to make money […] When our dollar is so weak against the pound and the USD, it takes a lot of grunt for us to get something in front of them that's gonna move the needle.'

Amongst Kiwi promoters he’d spoken to, this year had “widely been considered one of the hardest” they had ever had. Scale is something we would always struggle with in New Zealand, and the financial factor meant line ups needed to be packed with guaranteed ticket sellers.

“The discovery aspect of festivals is definitely less than it was five to 10 years ago […] People are unwilling to spend what little money they have on a chance that it might be good, they want to know that it's going to be good.

“The numbers that Australia can get per concert, we can't do that. We just physically can't. We don't have the venues.”

Venue size and availability were issues Eden Park chief executive Nick Sautner aimed to rectify in the coming year. With the park’s limit of six shows per year, a single artist with a three-night run, such as Coldplay and their upcoming November shows, takes up half of the venue's annual concert allocation.

“The fact that thousands of New Zealand fans will be travelling from out of Auckland for Coldplay’s concerts indicates there's strong demand for this type of model.”

Sautner is seeking to double the number of shows the venue can host per year to 12. Work is also underway to increase the capacity of the venue. This year, the lower west stand was demolished making room for 10,000 more punters per night.

He concedes that it’s hard to say if they will be able to fill those 12 slots to capacity every year, but reckons it’s worth it to try. The economic impact of these big, multi-night shows on the community is significant.

P!NK's two performances in March brought more than $4.26 million to the region through tourism, accommodation, hospitality, and employment.

“Local bars and restaurants in Kingsland have reported the positive impact concerts at Eden Park have on their businesses, and each concert event creates over 3000 job opportunities.”

One major promoter called for perspective amid the doom and gloom, saying New Zealand had welcomed some of the world’s biggest acts this year.

“It has been an unprecedented year for stadium touring in our part of the world,” Live Nation New Zealand managing director Mark Kneebone said, via email. “We’ve seen a record year for stadium shows in 2024 including three shows across Auckland and Dunedin with P!nk, and we’re preparing to host one night at Eden Park with Travis Scott, two nights at Mt Smart Stadium with Pearl Jam and three nights with Coldplay at Eden Park.

“Demand for these shows is high and New Zealand continues to be a strong touring destination.”

For Schulz, however, the concern remains that artists will come to expect Kiwis to travel to Australia if they want to see them perform, pricing many of us out.

“Tickets are expensive enough, so you already need quite a bit of money just to go to these shows,” he said. “When you have to book your own flights and accommodation, that's a couple of grand, plus time off work, you're taking leave, it's a big ask for most people in a cost of living crisis.”