Overlooked Or Over-Saturated: New Zealand Seeks To Find The Perfect Live Music Balance (Australia/New Zealand Special 2025)

New Zealand’s proximity to Australia makes it an easy jump for acts to tour both markets; equally, there is a presumption that New Zealand fans will travel to Australia for big shows.

“There are a lot of international artists coming through, from 300 capacity to 50,000,” says Brent Eccles of Eccles Entertainment.

Despite such demand, Eccles, who produces shows in New Zealand and is also a representative for Frontier Touring, admits it can be expensive and logistically difficult to tour New Zealand. “You can’t necessarily get the same production elements that you might get in Australia,” he says. “You might have to bring it in from Australia and that puts the costs up.”

Mark Kneebone, MD of Live Nation New Zealand, says it’s an issue they are addressing. “We’ve risen to the challenge of tackling the cost of freighting production across the Tasman Sea, which has been a success,” he says. “We’ve lowered the cost of air freight and show delivery costs to get Spark Arena back to being as attractive as arenas on the east coast of Australia.”

James Parkinson, director of Auckland Stadiums, suggests the tilt toward residencies in one country is another issue for New Zealand. “Artists [are] choosing to do a couple of the large cities in Australia and not coming across to New Zealand at all,” he notes.

While they hosted four outdoor shows last year, when we spoke, they still had no concert bookings at Go Media Stadium this year. Parkinson says there are wider efforts to make New Zealand a priority stop for international artists. “Auckland is very aware of the importance of events to the economics of the city,” he says. “It is very focused on finding new avenues to help fund event activity into the city.”

Nick Sautner, chief executive of Eden Park Stadium in Auckland, cites a number of macro challenges for the sector.

“Rising production costs, inflationary pressures, limited seed funding and cost-of-living concerns are influencing both consumer spending and touring decisions,” he says. Of how the market should be tackled, he suggests, “[New Zealand] is smaller and more isolated than Australia, which means tour routing and logistics need to be carefully planned […] Eden Park can and should be the southern anchor for Asia-Pacific touring.”

Away from the stadium-fillers, however, the market prognosis is not necessarily glowing.

Mikee Tucker of promoter and booking agency Loop says, “Ticket sales and event attendance are at an all-time low,” with a number of complex reasons underpinning this. “The factors leading to this decline are content over-saturation and significant financial pressures in terms of rising event costs and a lack of disposable income among ticket buyers,” Tucker adds. “Audiences are increasingly waiting until the very last minute to purchase tickets. This severely impacts the promoters’ ability to plan and invest confidently in events.”

Away from the big names competing for the same audiences, he says the grassroots sector in New Zealand badly needs support and investment.

He suggests that the best approach is to extend the touring route of acts (both domestic and international) beyond the two or three largest cities. “One of our standout successes this year was summer’s LAB tour across New Zealand and Australia where we sold in excess of 65,000 tickets,” he says. “The tour’s success was definitely driven by a stacked lineup and strategic venue selection in the content-starved regions.”

Eccles says New Zealand, with a population of just over 5 million, might be small, but it has “very keen and loyal fans” and so should be a bigger touring priority.