I’m going to talk about something that doesn’t make for sexy headlines but is quietly killing live music venues across Australia: insurance.

Not sound systems. Not streaming. Not audience tastes changing. Insurance. Specifically, public liability insurance premiums that have increased so dramatically over the past three years that venues are being forced to choose between cutting live programming, passing costs directly to punters, or closing altogether.

I’ve been in this industry for over 30 years and I’ve seen threats come and go. Pokies gutting pub music in the ’90s. The noise complaint crackdown of the 2010s. The pandemic. Each time, the industry adapted and survived. But the insurance crisis feels different because there’s no one to fight. There’s no bad policy to campaign against, no developer to protest. There’s just a spreadsheet in an insurer’s office that says live music venues are too risky to cover at affordable rates.

What’s Happening

Let me put some numbers on this. A mid-capacity venue — say 500-800 people — in Sydney or Melbourne that hosts live music 4-5 nights a week was paying roughly $30,000-50,000 annually for public liability insurance five years ago. Today, the same venue is looking at $80,000-150,000. Some have been quoted over $200,000.

That’s not a rounding error. For a venue doing $1.5-2 million in annual revenue with thin margins, a $100,000 increase in insurance costs is the difference between viability and closure.

The increases aren’t uniform. Venues with bars (almost all of them) pay more because alcohol service is a risk factor. Venues with outdoor areas pay more. Venues in areas with residential neighbours pay more. Venues that host all-ages shows pay more. Venues with mosh pits, crowd surfing, or standing-room events pay substantially more than seated venues.

This means the venues that are most central to Australian live music culture — loud, standing-room, bar-equipped rock and indie rooms — are the ones getting hit hardest.

Why It’s Happening

Several factors have converged.

Post-pandemic claims. The COVID period and its aftermath saw a spike in personal injury claims across hospitality generally. Slip-and-fall incidents, crowd incidents at events that were running with reduced or inexperienced staff, and a general increase in litigation. Insurers responded by repricing the entire hospitality entertainment sector upward.

Reinsurance market hardening. Australian insurers buy their own insurance from global reinsurers, and the global reinsurance market has tightened significantly due to natural disasters, climate risk, and geopolitical uncertainty. These costs get passed down the chain. Your local pub’s insurance premium is, in a very real sense, affected by hurricane seasons in the Caribbean and flooding in Europe.

Fewer insurers in the market. Several insurers have simply withdrawn from covering live music and entertainment venues, either because they’ve decided the risk profile doesn’t suit their portfolio or because they’ve been burned by claims. When fewer companies are competing for your business, prices go up. It’s basic supply and demand.

The Astroworld effect. The 2021 crowd crush at Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston, which killed 10 people, sent shockwaves through the global entertainment insurance market. Even though the circumstances were specific to that event — a massive outdoor festival with catastrophic crowd management failures — insurers globally repriced crowd risk upward. Australian venue operators are now paying, in part, for an incident that happened on another continent under completely different conditions.

The Insurance Council of Australia acknowledges that entertainment and hospitality sectors face challenges but points to claims data as justification for premium increases. From their perspective, the numbers add up. From the industry’s perspective, the numbers are going to put us out of business.

The Real-World Impact

This isn’t theoretical. I can point to specific consequences I’ve seen in the past 18 months.

Venues cutting live music nights. Several Sydney and Melbourne venues have reduced their live music programming from 5-6 nights to 2-3 nights per week, replacing music nights with DJ sets, trivia, or dining — activities that attract lower insurance premiums. Every night of live music that disappears is work lost for musicians, crew, and sound engineers.

Venues dropping crowd-contact events. Mosh pits, crowd surfing, and stage diving are insurance nightmares. Some venues have started explicitly banning these activities, with security enforcing no-mosh zones. I’ve seen venues refuse to book hardcore, punk, and metal acts specifically because of the insurance implications of the crowd behaviour these genres attract. That’s genre discrimination driven by actuarial tables, and it’s erasing parts of our live music culture.

Festivals struggling. Outdoor festivals face even higher premiums than permanent venues because they involve temporary infrastructure, larger crowds, and weather exposure. Several smaller Australian festivals have cited insurance costs as a primary reason for not returning post-pandemic. The ones that survive are passing costs to punters — which is why festival tickets have jumped 30-50% in three years.

Regional venues hit hardest. Venues in regional towns often have fewer insurer options and less negotiating power than city venues. A pub in Ballarat or Wollongong that puts on bands three nights a week doesn’t have a long list of underwriters competing for their business. Some regional venues have simply stopped hosting live music because they can’t find affordable coverage.

What Can Actually Be Done

I’ve talked to venue operators, industry bodies, insurers, and government people about this. Here are the solutions that have the most merit.

Industry-wide group buying. Live Performance Australia and state-based live music offices have been exploring collective insurance purchasing, where the industry negotiates as a bloc rather than individual venues going to market alone. This model works in other sectors — agricultural cooperatives do it, professional associations do it — and there’s no reason it can’t work for live music. The challenge is getting hundreds of diverse venues to agree on a common framework, but the economic incentive is strong.

Government-backed insurance pools. After the Northern Territory’s Cyclone Reinsurance Pool was established to address unaffordable insurance in disaster-prone areas, there’s been discussion about a similar model for entertainment venues. The government would act as insurer of last resort, ensuring coverage is available at regulated rates. This requires political will and Treasury support, and I’m not holding my breath, but it’s the right structural answer.

Risk reduction certification. Some insurers offer reduced premiums for venues that can demonstrate specific risk management practices — trained crowd management staff, incident reporting systems, maintained infrastructure, first aid capabilities. The problem is there’s no standardised certification for this in Australia. Creating an industry-standard venue safety certification, with premium discounts attached, would give venues a pathway to lower costs while genuinely improving safety.

Better claims data. The insurance industry’s risk assessment of live music venues is based on broad hospitality data, not venue-specific claims history. A well-run 600-cap venue with professional security and experienced staff gets lumped in with a dodgy pub that hosts unregulated events with no crowd management. If the industry can provide granular claims data showing that professionally operated music venues are actually lower-risk than the broad category suggests, there’s an argument for differentiated pricing.

Tax deductibility and grants. In the short term, governments could make insurance premiums for cultural venues tax-deductible at an enhanced rate, or provide direct grants to offset premium increases. The Victorian Government’s Music Venues Support Program has included some insurance cost support, but it’s limited in scope and duration. This is a band-aid, not a cure, but it keeps venues alive while structural solutions are developed.

What I’d Say to the Insurers

I get it. You’re running a business. You’re looking at claims data and adjusting pricing accordingly. That’s how insurance works.

But live music venues aren’t just businesses. They’re community infrastructure. They’re the places where Australian artists develop their craft, where audiences discover new music, where neighbourhoods have cultural identity. When a venue closes because it can’t afford insurance, you don’t just lose a commercial tenant. You lose something that took decades to build and can’t be rebuilt once it’s gone.

The Annandale Hotel. The Tote (nearly). The HiFi Bar. The Palace. We’ve lost too many rooms already to development pressure and changing economics. Losing more to insurance pricing would be a particular kind of tragedy — death by spreadsheet.

The Clock Is Ticking

I don’t have a neat conclusion here because this story doesn’t have one yet. What I know is that the current trajectory is unsustainable. Premiums are rising faster than venues can absorb them, and the options for cost reduction are limited without structural intervention.

The live music industry needs to make noise about this — pun intended — at every level: local government, state government, federal government, insurance regulators, industry bodies. We need to make the case that live music venues are essential cultural infrastructure deserving of the same policy attention we give to theatres, galleries, and sporting facilities.

Because if we don’t, we’ll wake up in five years wondering why there are no rooms left to play in. And by then, it’ll be too late to fix.