Australia News: Festivals, APRAS, Loadin.com & More

After going virtual last year, major conference and showcase BIGSOUND returns to Brisbane in a physical form this September, while July’s Adelaide Guitar Festival becomes an annual event. –

With a reputation for highlighting export-ready acts and drawing international delegates set for deal-making, BIGSOUND stages Sept. 7-9 in the Fortitude Valley entertainment precinct. In 2019, it injected A$2.99 million ($2.30 million) into the Brisbane economy. There will be digital options for those who can’t attend in person.

Kicking off with Indigenous Showcase and Women In Music events, the conference discusses changing industry and audience dynamics, post-COVID business transition, cultural change, inclusivity and innovation, gender equality and safety, international economics and domestic politics.

Up to 150 acts will showcase during the event. 

“Never before has connection for our music community been more important,” said executive producer Angela Samut. The Levi’s Music Prize contributes A$90,000 ($69,473) in cash prizes with A$15,000 ($11,578) for three artists selected to showcase. 

Founded in 2007, the biennial Adelaide Guitar Festival (July 4-25) becomes annual this year, with artistic director and classical guitarist Slava Grigoryan saying, “2021 will mark a new era in our continued celebration of this beloved instrument.” 

Performances are centered around the Festival Centre (including a star studded 50th anniversary concert of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album) and expanded to aged care homes and regional areas, with this year a focus on the bass guitar, with showcases and workshops.

Other festivals returning include TEG Live and Empire Touring’s Sunset Sounds,  staging Nov. 20 at New South Wales’ Roche Estate winery in the picturesque Hunter Valley. Singer-songwriters Xavier Rudd, Pete Murray, Kasey Chambers, Josh Pyke and Ben Lee will all be performing there.

Melbourne’s Leaps And Bounds also returns to physical form this year for ten days starting on July 16.

Live Performance Australia’s flagship Helpmann Awards was cancelled for a second year and will return 2022. LPA expected the live entertainment sector would return to 100% capacity by October, based on the government’s schedule to vaccinate Australians against covid.

But there were endless delays to the process, worsened by the low public uptake to its contact tracing app. “For our live music sector in particular, some significant challenges remain before it can fully reactivate,” CEO Evelyn Richardson said.

MJR Presents pushed British reggae band UB40’ seven date 40th anniversary tour March 2022. They sold out their 2015, 2017 and 2018 tours.

The court heard that the party approached Universal about licensing the song but baulked at the A$150,000 ($115,794) fee for eight months’ use and stipulation that the band’s singer and lyricist Dee Snider approve any lyrical changes. 

Palmer claimed the election jingle was musically based on the 18th century Christmas carol “O Come All Ye Faithful” and he’d penned the words himself, inspired by actor Peter Finch’s famous line in the 1976 film Network: “[I’m mad as hell, and] I’m not going to take this anymore.”

Justice Anna Katzmann called this “ludicrous” and “fanciful” and the decision not to license the track “high-handed and contemptuous”. During the trial, Snider testified the use of the song by Palmer “not good for my heavy metal image”.

A number of Australian global breakthroughs had wins at the songwriters’ APRA Music Awards in Sydney on April 28.  

Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker took the songwriter of the year. His frequent collaborator Mark Ronson said via video that it was easy to relate to Impala music via “the atmosphere and the sonics…but really what I love the most at the root of it is the songs.” APRA also honored Parker for Impala’s “The Less I Know the Better” hitting 1 billion streams.

The Kid Laroi, who’s generated 1.28 billion streams on Spotify and received a $4.2 million advance from a Sony Music publishing deal, won breakthrough songwriter of the year. “This is crazy!” the 17-year old exclaimed from his home in Los Angeles.

There were standing ovations when the late Helen Reddy of “I Am Woman” fame, and country music matriarch Joy McKean were honored for special achievements, while Jimmy Barnes and bluesman Josh Teskey teamed up to pay tribute to Frontier Touring’s Michael Gudinski with “I Remember When I Was Young,” a hit in the ‘70s for Matt Taylor whom Gudinski managed.

Other winners included Midnight Oil, Tones & I, Nashville-based Morgan Evans, Flume, Cold Chisel’s Don Walker, Dean Lewis, The Teskey Brothers, Busby Marou and The Rubens.

Live production veteran Haydn Johnston’s Loadin.com launched a COVID Safe System to make event organizers compliant with regulations. 

It gathers health check documents, allows for multiple check-in points across large areas and different work zones, collect and manage data for quick contract tracing, manage staff follow ups and customize passes with required info to ensure safety of performers and workers. 

The system adopts an airline’s boarding pass system, where all information is gathered 24 to 48 hours ahead, and delivered to smartphones to be downloaded at the site. The idea is to avoid queues at gates, “At a festival, everyone is a rock star right from the person delivering the beer backstage, no one wants to wait at the gate so everything is prepared early,” Johnston told Pollstar. The report is ready by event’s end to send to health authorities.

Johnston, whose events management career began with Big Day Out, found that while looking for solutions while advancing 22 live festival days a year as well as countless acts of all genres, “everything available seemed to over complicate the process.” His partner in the venture, Alan James, designed websites for corporations as Siemen, Intranet, Qantas, Westpac and Pfizer.

Johnston said it was encouraging to see Australian festivals re-inventing the space post-covid. “Promoters like Splendour in the Grass are incredibly smart people and working through issues they’re faced with, why not sit and wait until the brand can reinvent itself and come back,” he said.