I did a run with a mate’s band last month — Newcastle, Tamworth, Dubbo, Wagga, Albury, then back through Bendigo. Six shows. Three of the venues we played in 2019 are gone. Two more had switched to function rooms with no PA and a manager who shrugged when we asked about a load-in time. The Albury gig was the only one that felt like proper touring used to feel.

If you’ve been on the road in regional Australia recently, you already know what I’m talking about. The mid-tier circuit that supported developing bands for forty years — the pubs that could pay $1,500 plus a feed and a couple of rooms — is hollowing out faster than anyone in the major capitals seems to notice.

The economics stopped working in 2022 and never recovered

A regional pub used to clear a decent night on bar takings alone. A Saturday night band would pull a crowd of 150, each punter would have four or five drinks across the night, and the publican was happy to drop $1,200 to $1,800 on the band because the bar made it back three times over.

That math broke. Beer prices went up, punters drink less, the pokies room makes more money with no staffing headache, and the kitchen runs at a tighter margin than ever. I spoke to a publican in Forbes last year who said his Friday band night used to clear $4,000 over the bar — now it clears $1,500 on a good week and the band still wants $1,800.

You can’t argue with him. The numbers are the numbers.

Insurance and compliance are the silent killers

The bit nobody outside the industry talks about: a regional venue’s public liability premium has roughly doubled since 2020. APRA AMCOS licensing went up. Security requirements for late-night trading got stricter in NSW and Victoria. RSA training, food safety, fire compliance — all incremental, all reasonable on paper, all murder for a 200-capacity room in a town of 8,000 people.

The Live Music Office has been banging on about this for years. They’re not wrong. Insurance alone has pushed some country venues to just stop hosting live music. It’s easier.

Where the touring economy actually moved

Bands aren’t doing fewer shows — they’re doing them in different places. Festivals (when they survive), the metropolitan clubs that still pull weeknight crowds, and increasingly, weird hybrid setups: brewery tap rooms, winery sheds, regional art galleries that suddenly have a PA and a $25 ticket gig once a month.

That brewery circuit is doing some genuinely interesting numbers. A taproom in Margaret River told me they pay bands a guarantee plus a cut of merch and they sell out 200-cap shows every second weekend. The drinkers are older, they pay attention, they actually buy the record at the merch desk. That’s a touring market.

But it doesn’t substitute for the old pub circuit. A band still needs the route between Melbourne and Brisbane, and the brewery scene is patchy at best between those two cities.

What it means for developing acts

This is the bit that’s bothering me. A new band used to learn how to be a band by playing four nights a week in front of disinterested country crowds. You learned how to fill an hour. You learned to read a room. You worked out which songs landed at 9pm and which ones died at 11.

If that circuit isn’t there, where do bands learn? The answer at the moment seems to be: they don’t. They release singles, build a TikTok presence, and then walk onto a festival stage with no idea how to hold a crowd because they’ve never played to one. I saw a band at a regional festival in March who’d put out three EPs and clearly hadn’t done thirty shows between them. It showed.

A couple of things that might actually help

Local councils could matter here. A few in Victoria — Ballarat and Geelong specifically — have started doing small venue grants, contributing to PA installs and acoustic treatment in pubs that want to host live music. It’s the kind of small, boring intervention that actually moves the needle. The Australia Council has touring funds but they’re aimed higher up the food chain.

Tour booking agents need to start packaging regional runs again. Three or four agents I’ve spoken to have basically given up on regional NSW outside the obvious stops. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — if nobody books the rooms, the rooms close, and now there’s nothing to book.

And punters in regional towns: turn up. Pay the cover. Buy a t-shirt. The room you walked past last Saturday because you couldn’t be bothered won’t be there next year if enough Saturdays go past empty.

What I’m watching this winter

A handful of indicators I’m tracking through the cold months: how many of the Tamworth-adjacent rooms come back online for the country music festival circuit, whether the Tasmanian winter touring market holds up, and whether any of the major booking agencies start fronting regional risk again with guarantees rather than door deals.

I’ll have more to say once we get into the festival announcement season in August. The regional picture is going to be ugly reading, but pretending it isn’t happening won’t fix it.