Where Your Music Money Actually Goes

A ticket to a gig on a Friday night at a local dive bar in NZ will cost somewhere between about $15 and $25, maybe even cheaper if you're lucky. Meanwhile, if you head down the road on the same night to something like Auckland's Spark Arena or similar in other cities, it'll average somewhere between $100 and $140 (or even $300+ for a good seat). At least 5 times the price for what seems on the outside to be a similar sort of night, a live music night out. What's even more interesting though, is what actually happens to your money after it beams itself out of your banking app. Because one of those tickets keeps your money mostly in the country, and the other one sends it mostly overseas.

You could, if you wanted to, think of your concert ticket as a miniature trade deal. Buying one is either importing culture from overseas or backing something made here. Both can be valid in their own way of course, but there is a difference. A lot of people don't think about it this way (so I've found), but it can be a revealing lens. Spark Arena is owned by Live Nation, which is the same American company that promotes and routes a lot of the big international tours. So when you hand over $120, a large proportion of that is going towards a global production (often large scale), an international artist's fee, a promoter's share, and a 'service fee' that appears at checkout like a surprise gremlin. Most of that is heading overseas to the artist's team in their country, the touring company, the parent company etc. What'll stay in NZ is the local parts like the venue staff, security and car parking. It's an awesome evening, and also, economically, closer to an import. You've spent $120 or more to enjoy culture made somewhere else and shipped in, like a very loud avocado. A local venue like a city dive bar, on the other hand, might hold 200 people, run independently, and book mostly local and emerging acts. Your $20 covers the room, the sound engineer, and a door split with the band and whoever organised it, but not much else. For example, there isn't an international artist fee, or a global tour, or parent companies to fund. That's a big part of why it's about a tenth of the price, it's less about a show being a tenth as good (local shows can be incredible), and more because nobody has to fly a lighting rig over the Pacific Ocean.

For a lot of people, streaming is where most of their music spend will come from, so in that sense it can matter more. One repeated myth that really needs to be busted, is this idea that your subscription fee goes directly to the artists you are streaming. Unfortunately, that's not the case, because on the pro-rata models most platforms use, your money just gets pooled with everyone else's, and then paid out based on each artist's share of the total streams. In other words, even if you spend a whole month lovingly giving your life a purely Aotearoa based soundtrack, if the rest of the country streams the same small group of international megastars, most of your money still follows their streams, not yours. In the first quarter of 2026, NZ music made up just 6.6% of all streams here. Ninety-three percent of what got played (and paid for), was music from somewhere else. So even though your subscription might be pooled locally, most of it is paid out to whoever holds the rights to that 93%. Your music money is leaving the country somewhat stealthily on direct debit every month. Even if you removed every foreign artist off your playlists, it would barely move the needle, because the pool doesn't care about your streaming specifically, it cares about everyone's streaming generally. The same way emptying an ice try into the sea probably won't solve climate change. Radio, weirdly, does better than streaming on this. In that same quarter, NZ music was 18.6% of radio play, nearly three times its streaming share, partly because there's a voluntary code nudging stations toward a minimum amount of local content. There's no equivalent for streaming here. Australia has committed to one and Canada has a revenue-sharing arrangement between streamers and broadcasters, but New Zealand has neither, so the streaming pool just moves with the crowd. The other leak is on the artist's side. This is because the money that does reach a NZ artist usually passes through a distributor, and often a label, each taking a cut before anything arrives for the artist. Bigger players tend to negotiate better terms, of course, but independent artists usually can't, so the size of the slice ending with the person who actually made the music depends a lot on how the deal behind them is structured. The actual numbers vary, but even within the range, by the time anything reaches a NZ artist's account, streaming works out to a fraction of a cent per play, meaning it takes hundreds of thousands of streams to see even four figures. The temptation is to give up, or to think that there's nothing we can do to help support artists in general, and particularly our own local scene, but we may have more power as music consumers than we sometimes imagine.

Firstly, the most impactful thing you can do if you want to support specific local artists is to contribute as directly as possible. If you are a bit of a fan, then the best way your money can show that is by buying something they are selling with as few middle men as possible, such as a ticket to their show, a t-shirt from their merch table, some physical media of their recordings like a CD or vinyl, or a digital download from Bandcamp, or their own website, if they have any of these things available. Secondly, the 6.6% I quoted earlier is not a fixed figure. It's the current figure, and collectively, it's changeable, even if your own streaming behaviour is only a drop in the bucket. It's probably good to mention here that there's also nothing wrong with streaming international music, so stream whatever you enjoy from any country of course, because that is the freedom and the privilege we have. It's just that local music starts from a much smaller base, so it needs a bit of a deliberate push to be heard at all. There are good examples of this in radio where either voluntary or more regulated local quotas have been shown to work by measurably lifting how much homegrown music actually gets heard. Australia is now legislating something similar for streaming, although New Zealand has nothing like this yet. It brings voting analogies to mind in that it can seem like a few streams of local music here and there from one listener can't make much of a difference to the overall outcome, but we all know that every vote counts, and when large numbers have an intent for change, it can have highly consequential effects. It's actually likely even more impactful when algorithms are amplifying the intent once they recognise it. So getting your mates listening to a local record, adding tracks to your playlists and intentionally choosing local, even just a few extra times per month can be enough to start shifting the aggregate. Bringing it back to starting a new indie label in the streaming era, this is the reasoning behind some of what we're doing and behind shows like The Lineup and Front Row Sessions. There are a lot of challenges, and obstacles, and we haven't even mentioned the impact of AI in this post yet (that's it's own very long story), but regardless of all these, there is still good music being played in whichever region you're in, and it's never a bad thing to pay attention to it, and support those who are making it, it whichever way you can.