2026 Impact INTL: Australia/New Zealand Honoree: Michael Christidis

Michael Christidis
Co-Founder & Managing Director
Untitled group

Favourite Place To See A Show: “The Forum Theatre, Melbourne. It has that beautiful level of intimacy and character, while still being memorable for bands and fans alike.”

Mike Christidis was 19 years old when he co-founded Untitled Group with Nicholas Grego, Filippo Palermo and Christian Serrao in 2014 in Melbourne.

They had the idea of a boutique festival called Beyond The Valley, while other festivals were trying to break the 200,000-audience mark, and ultimately fell over or fizzled out. Christidis and team admit they had no clue of how to run a festival and didn’t have a name when asked what the new collective was called, so opted for “Untitled.”

Beyond The Valley in the Victorian country debuted with a sellout of 35,000. They followed that up with Grapevine Gathering, which shifted 50,000. Other festivals Wildlands, For The Love, Pitch Music & Arts and Ability Fest went national. They expanded to a record label, Daily Nightly, and booking agency, Proxy. They have become the largest independent promoters with a staff of 65.

“Looking back at the 2025/26 AU summer, where Untitled sold a record-breaking 800,000+ tickets, the diversity of our touring roster is something I was very proud to play a part in,” Christidis notes, mentioning promoting artists including RÜFÜS DU SOL, Good Charlotte and Wu-Tang Clan.

RÜFÜS DU SOL and Good Charlotte alone sold 228, 439 tickets and ticked over $21.4 million. Christidis celebrated what he calls a career highlight when Beyond The Valley sold out for the second year in a row in August, this time on pre-sales alone.

“It’s Untitled Group’s flagship festival, which has now grown to the largest multi-day and most culturally impactful music festival in Australia,” he says. “To sell out instantly two years in a row has been something we’ve been building towards for some time and is an enormous moment for the team.”

His words he lives by are as thus: “I am a big fan of Richard Branson and his ‘screw it, let’s do it’ mentality. But in the music industry, it is always about raising the bar, so my version is, ‘Screw it, let’s do it bigger and better.’”