Untitled Group unveils Aussie Open music lineup
Untitled Group’s Nick Greco has discussed the “incredible” crossover opportunities for live music and sport after unveiling the lineup for a three-day festival set to take place during the 2025 Australian Open.
The festival will be held at Melbourne’s John Cain Arena from 23-25 January under the tennis tournament’s new entertainment banner AO Live, and will be the only music event to be held at a Grand Slam worldwide.
It will mark the third year in a row that Australia’s largest independent promoter has programmed the Aussie Open’s live entertainment programme. The company has also worked across other sporting showpieces.
“The opportunity for live music around sporting events is huge given Australia has such a deep affinity with sport and music,” says Greco, Untitled’s co-founder and managing partner. “We’ve also got a long history of pairing live music with our biggest sporting events, one that recently continued with Katy Perry performing at the AFL Grand Final and The Kid Laroi at the NRL Grand Final. Pairing live sport with live music connects with audiences on a global level, just look at the Super Bowl in America – and the recent announcement that the 2026 FIFA World Cup Final will have a Super Bowl-style halftime show.”
The first two nights of AO Live will be headlined by Benson Boone and Kaytranada, respectively, while the finale coincides with the Women’s Finals and will feature multiple artists, climaxing with performances from Kesha and Armand Van Helden.
“We’ve been working with the Australian Open for several years now, and it’s so exciting to be able to announce the AO Live lineup for 2025,” adds Greco. “The AO has been one of the most attended Australian sporting events for decades, but in recent years, has become one a must-see music event too.”
“The Victorian government has recognised the incredible opportunity for crossover between music and sports fans”
Any ticket purchased to AO Live automatically includes a ground pass for Australian Open 2025, with tickets starting from A$89 (€55). Praising the support of the local government in helping the festival come to pass, Greco is hopeful other cities will sit up and take notice.
“The Victorian government has recognised the incredible opportunity for crossover between music and sports fans, and been a key supporter, but it would be great to see other state governments and the federal government, all of whom profess to be supporters of live music, include crossover events as part of their future considerations,” he adds.
“As with our other festivals like Beyond The Valley, Pitch Music & Arts and Ability Fest, we’ve seen that brand equity is just as important as a strong lineup, and people are really seeking out experience and community in 2024. We’ll happily claim that we are the only music festival at a Grand Slam globally.”
Untitled’s recent successes include Beyond The Valley, which sold 85% of its tickets during presale and is on track to sell out ahead of its 28 December-1 January return to Barunah Plains in Hesse. In addition, its Wildlands festival (Brisbane, Adelaide Perth) has seen a 30% increase in ticket sales compared to this time last year.
It also reports sellouts shows with the likes of Solomon, Anyma, Ben Böhmer, and I Hate Models, as well as Dom Dolla’s national tour which has seen him sell out large outdoor venues such as Flemington Racecourses in Melbourne and Domain in Sydney.
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Untitled Group celebrates best festival season yet
Australian independent promoter Untitled Group has told IQ how it capitalised on a late surge in ticket sales to deliver its biggest summer season yet.
The Melbourne-headquartered company, which hosted 112 events around the country, sold more than 250,000 tickets during the 2022/23 summer period – a 25% increase on the previous 12 months.
Highlights included the first post-Covid camping edition of its Beyond the Valley festival, Dom Dolla’s New Year’s set and Nelly Furtado’s first Australian show in over 20 years.
“We’ve noticed a trend where people are more cautious with their spending and are only attending events that they deem as a non-negotiable,” Untitled managing partner and co-founder Nicholas Greco tells IQ.
“The challenge is to create a concept that offers a unique experience. In the current climate, trusted event brands have shone through, particularly those who are actively engaged with their audience.
“We’ve also seen that camping festivals which offer an immersive experience have a significant advantage over other festivals. The unique nature of the camping format sets it apart, and being able to see so many artists across multiple days makes it a more cost effective option.”
Greco says there has been a noticeable shift towards fans waiting longer to buy tickets for events.
“The current economic climate is impacting attendance numbers”
“We are seeing a strong uplift of ticket sales in the final four weeks leading up to the event date, even more so in the final week, which hasn’t really been the case for us in the past,” he observes. “So a key focus of ours is developing strategies to sustain the momentum all the way throughout our campaigns.”
He continues: “The current economic climate is impacting attendance numbers. With the cost of living increasing, our audience have a lot less disposable income to spend on entertainment. This also comes with the costs for artists to tour increasing, making it more challenging for music festivals to attract top tier talent. Festivals need to remain agile and adapt to survive.”
Untitled’s touring team has worked on tours for the likes of Glass Animals, The Kooks, Hayden James and Wu-Tang Clan, as well as its established festivals such as Beyond The Valley, Wildlands and Grapevine Gathering.
“Curating our festival lineup is definitely a team effort,” adds Greco. “We attend shows to get a firsthand experience of a wide range of artists, catch up with labels and other touring companies to get the pitches on upcoming acts, and have regular discussions with agents from around the world to keep up to date with who’s on cycle and wants to come to the region.
“This part is a lot less glamorous but the team analyses statistics on a daily basis to determine the popularity of artists and gauge our audience’s interest. It’s all just information gathering and it allows us to make the most informed decisions on which artists to include in the festival lineup, ensuring a diverse lineup that feels fresh every time.
Untitled Group recently hired former Live Nation and Three Six Zero veteran Andrew White as its new general manager. The firm restructured its booking team following its expansion to Asia Pacific and Europe in 2022, upping senior touring agent Monty McGaw to head of electronic, and went on to announce a further spate of new hires and promotions earlier this year.
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Australia’s Untitled Group on the return of live
Australia’s Untitled Group has reported strong ticket sales for the region’s summer period, despite a series of Covid-related setbacks.
The Melbourne-based independent promoter sold more than 200,000 tickets for the November to March period – in line with 2019 levels – even with the spread of the Omicron variant leading to mass cancellations and rescheduled events around the start of this year.
Australia reopened its international border in February for the first time in nearly two years. The country imposed some of the world’s strictest travel bans after shutting itself off in March 2020. However, Untitled Group co-founder Nicholas Greco tells IQ that market confidence has clearly taken a hit.
“Buying patterns have shifted dramatically”
“It feels like Covid is really behind us now but everyone is still cautiously navigating their way out and their path forward,” he says. “Buying patterns have shifted dramatically. We had become accustomed to seeing the majority of tickets being sold in the first few days of the campaign but that has been totally flipped and we’re seeing 30% of tickets sales in the week leading up to a show and even 10% in the last 24 hours. This makes planning quite difficult and very last minute.”
Melbourne spent longer under lockdown than any other city, totalling more than 250 days, before reopening in October 2021. Untitled’s first major post-lockdown event was Ability Fest – said to be the world’s first annual music festival aimed at normalising disability – organised with Australian paralympian Dylan Alcott, which raised more than £400,000 for the Dylan Alcott Foundation.
“We wanted to create an event where people of all abilities feel welcome to come and enjoy a music festival whilst raising money for his foundation to help those with disabilities,” explains Greco. “Dylan loved going to music festivals whilst he was growing up and spoke of how the first time he had felt included was at a music festival.
“However, we realised there are some barriers in order for those with disabilities to enjoy a music festival with ease so we implemented unique infrastructure and processes to cater for people of all abilities. We put in viewing platforms, flooring across the site for wheelchairs to get around, there’s a quiet area for people with sensory disabilities and Auslan interpreters sign the main stage.”
“We actually had a set up a postponement department which I am glad to say we have been able to retire now”
Untitled, whose co-founder Filippo Palermo was profiled for IQ‘s New Bosses 2020 series, moved its Beyond the Valley festival to an inner city location for 2021. The boutique event was renamed Beyond the City and was held over two days at Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl in December 2021, with Beyond the Valley to return later this year.
“It really felt like the start of a proper recovery, with 30,000 people enjoying the event with a mostly domestic bill and Hayden James counting us into 2022 with fireworks in the cityscape background,” says Greco. “Pitch Music & Arts, which is our four-day electronic music and arts festival, was also very special as it was the last major festival to go ahead in March 2020 and then the first one back without any restrictions and full of internationals – it felt like a real bookend moment for us as our first camping festival back.”
The firm has a stadium tour with Glass Animals lined up for July, with its multi-city Grapevine Gathering festival set to return across five states in October. Despite the disruption, Greco reports the firm was able to use the break afforded by the pandemic to refocus its operations.
“It really allowed us to take a step back and work less within the business and start to work on growing the business,” he says. “For so long it felt like we were going from event to event and sometimes chasing our tail in certain areas but we were able to grow all of our internal departments like marketing, touring, site/event, customer service and HR and taking that time has allowed us to really hit the ground running coming out of the pandemic with a really strong team.
“Having such a big team also allowed us to be very agile across the ever changing landscape of the last few years. We did outdoor shows, reduced cap shows, looked at seating models, rerouted and postponed and I really feel it’s made us stronger as a business. We had so many shows in the market that were constantly moving that we actually had to set up a postponement department which I am glad to say we have been able to retire now.”
“In such a short period of time, we’ve been able to build a diverse roster of 75 artists”
Home to an international and domestic artist touring division, artist management roster and record label, Untitled recently branched out further with the launch of its in-house booking agency, Proxy.
“Proxy materialised very naturally during Covid, when our bookings roster merged with another agency’s roster, and we were able to sign a lot of both developing and established talent to put together a culturally relevant roster,” says Greco. “Our head agent Steel Hanf joined Untitled Group in 2019, and we knew that if the time came where it made sense for us to start a booking agency, we would have an experienced agent that could look after the talent.
“We come across so much amazing talent in our day-to-day of putting on shows, so it was a logical next step for Untitled Group and something that kept us extremely busy during Covid. In such a short period of time, we’ve been able to build a diverse roster of 75 artists, and many of those made up most of our slots across our summer events calendar.”
Wrapping up, Greco says he expects the rest of the year to be “rocky” for the business as a whole as it navigates the after-effects of the shutdown, allied to further complications such as rising inflation and the war in Ukraine.
“We want to continue to book diverse line-ups across our events that are in touch with what our audience is wanting to see,” he adds. “We are very aware of our responsibility as a company to continue to improve on our diversity and inclusion goals and our sustainability initiatives.
“A lot of our shows are expanding and growing which is very exciting but we need to make sure they continue to stand out and are unique when the market is very saturated.”
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