AS THE COST-OF-LIVING crisis continues to bite, Irish music promoters and venues are worried that it will become financially unfeasible for international artists to put on shows here.
Many eyebrows were raised earlier this year when no Irish dates were included in Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour. Coldplay and Madonna have also left Ireland off their lists of destinations for their respective upcoming tours.
For global stars like those, there are a multitude of reasons why Ireland might be left off the list. But for smaller artists, it’s fairly simple: it’s too expensive.
Niall Byrne, the founder of Irish music news site Nialler9, explained that while gigs can often return a loss the first time a band comes to Ireland, promoters are usually confident that future shows will be profitable, when the artist is better known here.
But the spiralling costs of going on the road mean that promoters are becoming more risk-averse with shows which may make a significant loss.
“Oftentimes with promoters, if they’re bringing a band over [to Ireland] it is an investment. But I think there’s less of those punts happening these days,” Byrne told The Journal.
“Often a promoter would lose maybe on the first show, hoping down the line that you’d gain on the bigger shows, but there’s less risk being taken because those costs have just spiralled.”
Last summer, the Dáil was told that Irish Bruce Springsteen fans would be better off flying to Rome and buying tickets to the Boss’s concert there, rather than attending his Dublin shows.
Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty said that one fan priced a trip to the Italian capital, including concert tickets, as €200 cheaper than a one-night stay in Dublin for the show.
The profitability of gigs is becoming more and more reliant on tickets being completely sold out. Longtime promoter Pat Egan told The Journal: “When I was running shows years ago, [if] I sold 500 out of 1,000 [seats] I was into profit. Now I have to sell 850 out of 1,000 seats to be in profit.”
Egan, who has worked with artists such as U2, Phil Lynott and Eric Clapton, said the “margin for error” in putting on gigs is getting smaller and smaller: “If you make a bad call and you only do half a house, you’re going to lose quite a bit of money.”
The steep rise in costs comes from a combination of heavy insurance premiums, higher wages for venue staff and other operational costs rising.
Additionally, small promoters like Egan are becoming a relic of the past: now, most popular venues in Dublin, for example, are controlled by large promoters. This, Egan says, allows those companies to call the shots: “The promoters can charge themselves what they like and pass it on to onto the artist, and therefore the back end for the artist is reduced substantially.”
“When I ran gigs years ago, I could get on a plane and go over to London, and I’d knock on different people’s doors – the manager of Queen, the agent for Bob Marley.
“They would either tell me to feck off, or they’d bring me in and say, well, tell us about Ireland, how can we make money there?
“But you can’t do that anymore.”
It’s not beyond the realm of possibility for bands to cancel tours if it looks like they will make a significant loss: last October, American indie band Animal Collective axed their European shows due to “a mountain of touring obstacles related to Covid and the economy”.
Kieron Black, a booker at the Grand Social in Dublin, reckons Ireland is “the most expensive place in Europe to see an act play”.
“The international bands are definitely having trouble getting over here,” he told The Journal. “They could have sold out rooms and lose money because of all the travel costs and the hotel costs.
“I know when I book a band from overseas now and I have to get them a hotel room [for them] I have to do it months and months and months ahead of time to try and get the best possible price.
“It’s just outrageous how expensive it is.”
As well as increasing operational costs, venues have to pay high licensing fees to open late at night, beyond normal opening hours. This can enable late gigs or DJ sets to take place after gigs, giving more opportunity for earning.
Currently, late-night venues have to go to court every month to obtain approval to open on specific dates. They also must pay a fee of €410 per night to operate – which can add up to over €100,000 a year. That’s compared to annual fees of £2,000 in UK.
Campaign group Give Us the Night has argued that this fee, called the Special Exemption Order, has hurt the industry badly. Some 90,691 Special Exemption Orders were granted nationally in 2007, but this figure dropped to an estimated 37,500 in 2017.
Sunil Sharpe, a spokesperson for the group said: “The growing overheads for music venues, particularly nightclubs, has led to a point where many venues feel like they can’t afford to take much risk with their programming.”
“As a result we’re seeing much safer booking policies, and less opportunity for local upcoming collectives and acts to rise.”
“We’ve also seen a hike in venue rental fees, which for an international headliner show for instance, leads to excessive ticket prices,” Sharpe said. “Quite often these gigs then don’t sell as well as they could. It’s a vicious circle.”
He added that the impact of rising running costs across the last 20 years “has also led to a noticeable drop off in renovations and upgrades to venues”. They said that it is “unusual” to find a venue that owns a really good sound system, and that many venues rent the same equipment week in week out. They said this is all a sign of less available money to invest “due to the slim and uncertain profits that there often are on individual events”.
Sharpe called on the Government to tackle insurance and find a way to bring premiums down. “They could nationalise insurance; if this was viewed as a state of emergency – and businesses shutting down due to extraordinarily high premiums is an emergency – then they would be considering measures like this,” said the group.
“If the government can’t do anything on this, they could at least remove licensing costs,” he said, pointing out that it is unclear when the new licensing laws will be introduced.
He suggested that venues could occasionally give free rental to promoters, especially upcoming ones.
Sharpe concluded:
“Too much of the decision-making now for venues is based on short-term gain, and not enough to nurture our scene to be in a better place in the future. Without a scene you don’t have an industry, some venues understand that and are out to support communities and artists.”
Meanwhile, Kieron Black says that solicitor fees are required to obtain the Special Exemption Order, which adds further to the overall costs.
“So the system is flawed completely. It punishes the owners or the operators of each venue for opening,” he says.
International bands are still coming to Ireland “for now,” Black adds, but “they are walking away with less now.”
One upside to all of this is that there’s more space for Irish artists to play domestic shows. Black says: “We’re trying to be positive about everything, because there is goodness in all this.
“Irish artists are doing really well… people are going to see those shows.”
Byrne agrees: “You’ve seen a lot more Irish acts playing bigger venues in the last 10, 15 years than before.
“So that could be one positive, if it means less bands are coming here from [abroad] when they’re emerging and mid-sized, there’s more room for Irish bands to book those venues [and] build their own fan bases.”
But nevertheless, he says, “something is a bit broken” if international artists like Caroline Polachek “can sell out four or five gigs in Europe and the UK and they’re saying that [they're] operating at a loss.”
Polachek told Vulture magazine that her European tour would return a loss. The Manhattan-born singer has just under three million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Both Byrne and Black acknowledge that the issues their industry faces are not unique. Byrne says that the issues facing small- and medium-sized venues “are things that every other business is being affected by as well.”
Is government support needed? “[Venues] never had to ask for any help before because it’s a commercial business. It’s generally a profitable business,” Byrne said. But now, financial viability “is a problem that’s not gonna go away anytime soon.”
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