Live Business Breakfast: Variety Australia, Twilio Present Shortlist for ‘Best Australian Music Tour’
Australia’s premium youth publisher, The Brag Media, presents Variety Australia and Twilio’s inaugural Live Business Breakfast, June 13 at Sydney’s 12-Micron. On the morning, seven special awards will be handed out for excellence in live entertainment.
Variety Australia now unveils the shortlist for one of those categories, Best Australian Music Tour.
Australian live music fans enjoyed an embarrassment of riches in 2023 and 2024, as a slew of major tours made their way across this great southern land.
Three treks stood above the rest. They’re logged in the memories of everyone who attended, the industry professionals who made the magic happen, and the history books.
P!nk’s Summer Carnival Tour (Live Nation):
P!nk has a remarkable, years long love affair with Australia. It’s a relationship built on hard-work and a connection you can’t pull from the ether. It all paid off in a big way when the U.S. pop superstar dropped into Australia for the P!nk Summer Carnival Tour. Produced by Live Nation, the trans-Tasman trek was a record-buster. Its 950,000 tickets on the all-time podium for tickets sold on a single tour of these parts (behind Ed Sheeran, in front of Dire Straits).
The tour is notable for so many reasons. The Philadelphia native played regions, and filled 20 stadiums across the country — a record for any act. No trek by a solo female artist comes close to this blockbuster, though she got some help from Tones And I, the Aussie busker-turned-superstar who opened for the P!nk.
Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour (Frontier Touring):
Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour is music’s version of the Olympics. When it rolls into your country, TayTay becomes the boss for a couple of weeks. That was the case when the mega-trek stopped by Australia in February 2024 for seven shows (four at Sydney’s Accord Stadium, three at the Melbourne Cricket Ground). Prime minister Anthony Albanese showed that he too was a Swifty, when he was spotted enjoying the show in Sydney. Albo must have great connections; tickets sold out Swiftly.
Records fell, as they tend to do with Swift. The pre-sale set a new mark, according to Ticketek. She became the first artist since Madonna (in 1993) to perform three concerts at the MCG. And she was the first act to play four at Accor Stadium. Swift could have sold many multiples of her final ticket volume in Australia, but alas, she had other countries to conquer.
Fred again.. (Handsome Tours, Laneway Presents, TEG Live and Astral People):
In 2024, Fred again.. did something we’ve never seen before and might never see again. The British electronic music producer and artist surprise-announced an arena tour. In early March, Fred (real name Fred Gibson) appeared in our news feeds with the announcement of a Sydney Opera House — later that night. More than 145,000 people rushed to purchase tickets (the concert hall has a capacity of fewer than 3,000).
Fred became the first-ever artist to announce, sell out, and perform at the iconic venue, all within 24 hours. The surprises kept coming, as Fred announced a run of arena and pop-up shows around the country, all of them sellouts. An audacious and unprecedented strategy, one that no-doubt caused the support team to lose sleep, but was executed to perfection with roughly 230,000 tickets sold.