I didn’t think I’d need to write this piece in 2026, but here we are. Pay-to-play — the practice of charging artists a fee or requiring them to sell a minimum number of tickets to secure a performance slot — is growing in the Australian market, and it’s corroding the grassroots live music ecosystem from the inside.

How it works

Pay-to-play comes in several forms, some more obvious than others:

Direct fee. The venue charges the artist $200-$500 for a performance slot. The artist is effectively renting the stage.

Minimum ticket sales. The artist must sell 30-50 tickets at a set price, or pay the difference. If you can’t sell 30 tickets at $20, you owe the venue $600.

Ticket pre-purchase. The artist buys a block of tickets at a wholesale price and is responsible for reselling them. Unsold tickets are the artist’s loss.

“Production fees.” A charge for sound, lighting, or PA use that’s presented as a production cost but is really a venue fee in disguise.

All of these shift the financial risk from the venue to the artist, and they all have the same corrosive effect on the quality and diversity of live music.

Why it’s toxic

Pay-to-play selects for artists with money, not talent. A wealthy hobbyist can pay $500 for a slot that a talented but broke artist can’t afford. The venue’s programming quality deteriorates, audiences notice, and eventually the room stops being a viable live music venue.

It also encourages dodgy behaviour. Artists who need to sell a minimum number of tickets resort to pressuring friends and family to buy tickets to shows they have no interest in attending. This generates one-time sales, not genuine audience building. The people who showed up because they were guilted into it don’t come back.

And it devalues the act of performing itself. If artists have to pay for the privilege of playing music, the message is clear: your performance has negative value. That’s destructive to the culture of live music at a fundamental level.

The venue perspective

I understand why venues do it. Running a live music room is expensive and risky. Sound engineers, security, door staff, equipment maintenance — these costs exist whether the room is full or empty. When a venue programs an unknown artist and nobody shows up, the venue loses money.

But the answer to that problem isn’t to outsource the risk to the artists. The answer is better programming, better promotion, and a business model that doesn’t depend on every night being a sell-out.

The most successful independent venues in Australia don’t use pay-to-play. They invest in their programming, build audiences over time, and accept that some nights will be quiet as the cost of developing a strong overall program. They understand that the 30-person Tuesday show is where the 300-person Saturday headliner started.

What should happen instead

For emerging artists, the right model is a door deal or a small guarantee. The venue takes some risk, the artist takes some risk, and both parties are invested in making the night work. If the artist draws well, everyone benefits. If they don’t, the venue has a relatively small loss and the artist has gained experience.

For the industry more broadly, we need to call out pay-to-play whenever we see it. Artist advocacy organisations should maintain lists of venues that use these practices. Industry media should cover it. And artists should refuse to participate, even when the promise of a “good slot” or “industry exposure” makes it tempting.

The venues that charge artists to play are not doing those artists a favour. They’re running a business model that treats musicians as customers rather than partners, and it’s killing the grassroots scene that feeds the entire live music ecosystem.

If a venue can’t sustain live music without charging artists to play, then perhaps live music isn’t the right model for that venue. But asking the artists to subsidise a failing business model is not the answer. It never has been.