Touring music in Australia

Australia is a long country with a handful of dense live-music cities and a lot of driving between them. Touring here is a logistics exercise that happens to include concerts.

This hub will not publish a secret list of “best rooms”. Rooms open, close and change policy. Name the room you have actually confirmed. It will not invent a ticket price or a capacity figure.

Route before poster

Draw the path on a map. Measure driving hours, not just kilometres. Include ferry or flight legs as first-class costs, not footnotes. Build rest. A crossing that looks tidy on social media and wrecked in the car park is a failed design.

Perth is the classic illustration: the Nullarbor (or a flight) is the show before the show. The rewritten heritage note at touring Perth exists so that path still teaches something. The national checklist is first Australian tour.

Work backwards from get-out. If a Sunday drive is eight hours and a Monday school workshop is at 9am, you do not have a plan. You have a hope.

Paper

For each date, keep:

• Written confirmation of date, load-in, set length and fee or door deal
• Who provides backline
• Who pays accommodation
• Guest-list cap
• Cancellation terms
• A contact who will be on site

Verbal “you’re locked” is not locked. Email is enough; a portal is enough; a text message that can be exported is enough. A memory of a bar conversation is not.

Live Performance Australia is the peak body to read when you want sector-level live-industry context. Your contract is still your contract.

Riders that a room can honour

A rider is a technical and hospitality document, not a personality test. Ask for the inputs, monitors, power and safety conditions you need. If you do not need a specific extra, do not list it for theatre.

Send the rider early enough that the room can say no. A no before you travel is a gift.

Hospitality riders should be humane and finite. Dietary needs are real. Invented excess is how small rooms stop taking you seriously.

The road is a workplace

The Fair Work Ombudsman is the public source for minimum pay, record-keeping and safety-adjacent employment questions. People you take on the road — driver, tech, merch, support — are not extras in a film about your band. They are workers or contractors with terms.

Write who is employed, who is invoicing, who is volunteering (and whether that is even lawful in the situation), and who holds insurance. If you do not know, stop and find out before you promote the run.

If a tour collapse becomes a personal crisis, Support Act is the music-specific relief organisation.

Merch, recording the show, permissions

Selling recordings of the night implicates the same two copyrights as any other release: the works and the sound recording, plus whatever the venue’s policy says about filming. See releasing and galleries.

Do not assume you may film every support act. Ask.

Guest education

Touring education — how to write a stage plot, how to teach a school-show day, how to plan hearing protection on festival sides — is a good guest-post fit. A reconstructed recap of a 2017 festival that we cannot verify is not.

Support acts, local crews, and not extracting a city

A visiting artist who treats a local support as free labour plus a plus-one is teaching the city to ignore them next time. Write the support deal. Share the plot. Give them soundcheck if the paper says so. Pay them when you said you would.

Local crew knowledge — where the dock is, which lift is a liar — is work. If you use it, pay or trade honestly. The Perth heritage note exists because distance makes extraction tempting; the ethic is national.

Festival weeks versus club weeks

A festival date is often a different paper: shorter set, shared backline, a changeover that will not wait for your personality. Ask for the festival’s current artist guide rather than inventing one from a previous year. A club week is a string of similar rooms and a van that starts to smell like the rider.

Do not mix the two on a sheet as if they were the same job. Your body already knows they are not.

School shows and regional halls

A daytime school show is a different workplace: child-safety checks, a PA that must be safe at 10am, and a set that can survive a fire drill. Read the school’s current rules. Do not invent them from a pub gig. Regional halls may have a kitchen, a committee, and a hearing loop — ask, in the same email as the date.

The first-tour checklist treats these as dates, not as filler.

Announce after the spine exists. The poster is not a confirmation engine.