Can Australian Music Survive in the Age of Spotify?
A Melbourne queer nightclub couldn’t get insurance for two years. Here’s what the ALMBC is doing about it.
A Melbourne queer nightclub has spent two years completely unable to get insurance coverage. ABC News reported on the venue’s experience this week, one of the starkest illustrations yet of an insurance market that has fundamentally broken down for Australia’s live music and entertainment sector. For anyone who has been following the ALMBC’s advocacy, the story will feel very familiar.
A market in breakdown
The numbers from across the sector tell a consistent story. Pride of Our Footscray Community Bar, a community-owned queer venue in Melbourne’s inner west, has a perfect safety record and zero insurance claims across eight years of trading. None of that mattered to the market. Its annual public liability premium exploded from around $6,000 in 2020 to nearly $143,000 by 2024, a rise of more than 2,500 per cent. When the venue’s broker approached 19 insurers for quotes, 18 refused outright, categorising drag bingo, poetry readings and community fundraisers in the same risk bucket as demolition contractors and motorsport operators.
Across town at Belgrave’s Sooki Lounge, public liability costs jumped from $15,000 before COVID to $60,000, with co-owner Stephen Crombie describing the experience as ‘putting your head in a washing machine, on all 12 cycles’. At venue after venue across the country, operators are facing premium increases of hundreds or thousands of per cent, with zero claims history and no change in the nature of their operations.
These are not abstract policy problems. They are the rooms where Australian artists develop, where communities form, and where the next generation of live music is made. When they close, they do not come back.
The ALMBC’s response
The ALMBC has been tracking this crisis across the live music sector for years. We have built the evidence base, worked in partnership with the Insurance Council of Australia, and pushed for structural reform long before it became mainstream news.
When the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services launched its Inquiry into Small Business Insurance in late 2025, we moved quickly. The ALMBC led a national response on behalf of our members – venue operators, sole traders and small to medium businesses from right across the country. We coordinated with music industry organisations and state bodies to put a unified voice from the live music sector in front of the Committee before submissions closed on 6 March 2026.
Our submission put real cases and real numbers on the record: venues that could not get a single quote, premiums that had risen by thousands of per cent without a single claim, and culturally vital small businesses being misclassified by insurers who have never set foot in a live music room. We called for reformed underwriting practices, meaningful coverage pathways for community and cultural venues, and a regulatory framework that actually works for businesses operating at the grassroots end of the sector.
What comes next
The Inquiry is chaired by Senator Deb O’Neill and the Committee is due to report by 27 October 2026. The ALMBC will stay engaged throughout that process and will update our community as findings emerge.
Stories like the one ABC News reported this week are exactly why this advocacy matters. Insurance is not a bureaucratic sideshow. It is the difference between a venue opening its doors on a Friday night and locking them for good. We will keep pushing until the system changes.
