Auckland's 'great stadium debate' is all about sport. That's stupid.
All we hear about is sport, sport and more sport. What about concerts?
At the end of this month, a huge decision has to be made.
That decision will impact anyone who enjoys live stadium spectacles in the country’s biggest city in a major way.
The choice amounts to this:
Either we zhoosh Eden Park, revamp the stands, give it a pedestrian overpass, expand its capacity, upgrade its facilities, increase the pitch size, install an all-purpose roof, and make it look something like this.
Or, we build a brand new stadium from one of three options: a 50,000-capacity Quay Park stadium behind Spark Arena, a bigger $2 billion sunken stadium called The Crater on Bledisloe Wharf, or a 50,000 capacity venue at Wynyard Point.
Debate has been raging over this decision for months now as an Auckland Council working group examines all the options to make a recommendation by the end of May.
News sites are counting down the decision, debating the options, trying to outdo themselves with scoops and insider goss and opinion pieces all disagreeing on which way things might swing.
Aside from my failed campaign to build support for a megadome, I’ve stayed the hell away from all this for two reasons.
First, this debate has been raging for decades. It has been relentless, and I’ve already written about it, covered it, and read every headline and hot take there is to have.
I’m burnt out and over it. By now, it feels like this is all it would ever be: a debate full of hot air and empty promises, one with no outcome for the foreseeable future.
But the second reason, the thing that makes me so mad, and the reason I’ve decided to weigh in today, is that the great Auckland stadium debate has almost entirely been centered around one thing and one thing only.
Sport. Sport. And more sport.
Each stadium option promises multi-use facilities for various sporting codes, like pitches that can accommodate cricket, rugby and league.
The Quay Park option is backed by Former Warriors chief executive Jim Doyle and includes plans to build a themed All Blacks hotel.
Eden Park would get an expanded pitch capable of properly hosting multiple sporting codes, so the leg-side boundary for cricket games isn’t about 12 metres away.
In an episode of The Detail published about this exact topic today, which picks Eden Park as the favoured option, the conversation overwhelmingly surrounds sport and what stadiums can do for the various codes.
“We tend to wait until we’ve got an event coming up and that forces us to act to create a new venue or upgrade the facilities we’ve got,” says Brian Finn, the former head of communications for Auckland Rugby.
“We saw that a little bit around the FIFA Women’s World Cup, and to a much greater degree around the men’s Rugby World Cup in 2011.”
Grr.
All of this sports talk is entirely stupid and dumb, and completely misses the point.
I cannot remember the last time a sporting code completely filled a stadium in Aotearoa.
I asked my rugby-mad friend (he wrote a book about it!) and he can’t remember either.
“It would almost certainly be the last All Blacks game,” he said, making it the clash against Australia in Dunedin in the middle of last year.
You know what I do remember?
Foo Fighters packing in tens of thousands of people out at Go Media Stadium in January, then doing the same thing in Wellington and Christchurch.
Or Pink, selling out Eden Park twice over in March, and doing the same in Dunedin.
Or The Weeknd selling out Eden Park twice (then postponing and cancelling those shows), Coldplay doing the same thing three times, and Pearl Jam heading that way out at Go Media Stadium too.
Right now, it feels like concerts are outselling sporting events by quite some margin.
I don’t have stats to back this up. I’m not sure anyone even keeps those kinds of figures. (I have asked Live Nation and will update you if they come through.)
But what I do have is this 1News story from January.
It predicts an explosion in popularity for concerts and stadium shows this year.
“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,” Live Nation’s managing director Mark Kneebone says in that piece, in which he admits the world’s biggest touring company is selling 80% of all the tickets they put on sale here.
“The excitement is huge. The demand for tickets is massive.”
You know what else that story says?
This year “will be the first that music events outsell sporting events” at Eden Park.
So we don’t need stadiums that can accommodate multiple sports codes.
They should be built, first and foremost, with concerts, artists and music fans in mind.
That means bucket seats that swivel so you’re not sitting on them on an angle for four hours at a time.
Grounds that don’t need stupid plastic mats placed over their precious grass.
Acoustically designed venues that don’t send echoes bouncing around the stands.
Permanent stages, screens and lighting ready for the next act to roll in and use.
After the Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney and Billie Eilish concert debacles, we don’t need another sports venue built in Auckland.
We need a purpose-built concert venue.
Will anyone listen to me?
No.
Will this happen?
Almost certainly not.
Will we still be debating this in 10 years?
You can absolutely bloody guarantee it.
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Everything you need to know…
If we do build a new venue with music in mind, let the plight of Manchester’s Co-Op Live serve as a warning. It has delayed its opening, and shows by Olivia Rodrigo and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, because of various ongoing concerns, including falling stage gear. Now, Liam Gallagher’s threatening to boycott it.
Billie Eilish may not be coming here, but fans in Australia are not happy about the steep ticket prices which are right up there with SZA. Newshub has more.
New Zealand artists are struggling, and a new story by RNZ’s Tony Stamp puts that in stark perspective. “A lot of the industry is musicians paying to prop it up,” says Delaney Davidson. “It costs to be a high-profile musician.” Read it here.
“What is a song?” asks New York Times ($), a seemingly dumb question that, after a series of copyright cases, is being taken increasingly seriously. This piece explains exactly how music is made, who owns which part of a song, and why copyright is becoming an increasingly big part of the music-making process.
Madonna, 1.6 million people and Copacabana Beach. The photos are insane.
Finally, if you’re wondering what happened to The Naked and Famous, wonder no more. ‘Empty Voices’ is the new song from Thomas Powers and it sounds nothing like his former life in the ultra-slick power-pop duet. Instead, this is a brooding bedroom mood piece featuring backing voices from Julien Baker. It’s taken from his new album, A Tyrant Crying in Private, due out on May 17.
