New Zealand projects record touring business

A record year is being forecast for New Zealand’s concert scene, with Live Nation APAC revealing it has already sold out 80% of its shows in the market for 2024.

Artists including Foo Fighters, Jonas Brothers, Queens of the Stone Age, Blink-182 and Iron Maiden are due to play at venues across the country in 2024.

And national stadium Eden Park has two dates scheduled with P!nk from 8-9 March and three nights with Coldplay on 13 & 15-16 November. Spokesperson Duncan Blomfield tells 1News it will be the first year that music events outsell sporting events at the 60,000-cap Auckland stadium.

“The biggest one will of course be Coldplay, we’ve already got three concerts announced,” says Blomfield. “Sixty thousand people at each concert — so 180,000 to 200,000 just for that one event.”

P!nk will also perform at Forsyth Barr Stadium, Dunedin on 5 March.

“Concerts used to be something that people would go to once or twice a year, but now it’s something they’re going to four or five or six times a year,” says Mark Kneebone, MD New Zealand at Live Nation APAC. “The excitement is huge. The demand for tickets is massive.”

Frontier Touring, meanwhile, will present Foo Fighters at the 47,000-cap Go Media Stadium in Auckland on 20 January. The band will also perform at Apollo Projects Stadium in Christchurch on 24 January and Wellington’s Sky Stadium on 27 January.

“We have had to wait a long time to bring Laneway Festival back to Aotearoa”

St Jerome’s Laneway Festival, which debuted in the country in 2010, will take place in New Zealand for the first time since 2020. After two years of pandemic cancellations, the 2023 edition was scrapped due to flooding.

Laneway 2024 will return to Aotearoa on Waitangi Day, 6 February, at the outer fields at Western Springs. Acts include Stormzy, Steve Lacy, Dominic Fike, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Raye and AJ Tracey.

“We have had to wait a long time to bring Laneway Festival back to Aotearoa,” says Laneway Festival co-founder Danny Rogers. “We were humbled by the outpouring of support shown to us earlier this year, and can’t wait to return, bringing an epic lineup of some of the world’s most exciting performers to this incredible venue in 2024.”

Plus, Tom Jones will perform a NZ exclusive performance at McLean Park in Napier on 6 April.

Elsewhere, Auckland’s Spark Arena has upcoming shows by artists such as Kid Laroi, The National, Jonas Brothers, Iron Maiden, Thirty Seconds to Mars and Tate McRae, while Wolfbrook Arena in Christchurch will welcome Matchbox Twenty, Queens of the Stone Age, Blink-182 and Incubus in the first half of the year.

PwC’s Economic Contribution of the NZ Music Industry 2023 report found that live performance had an estimated total economic impact of $167m and 1,703 FTEs, after accounting for multiplier effects, with homegrown content contributing just over a quarter of these impacts.

According to the 2023 Global Promoters Report, new festivals and venues are expected to see significant growth in New Zealand over the next decade.

Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.