The Wrong Question
The night started with a simple premise, Where’s Jai? Naming a band is hard with you needing to find a name that is unique, meaningful and fits the thing being named. The name Where’s Jai, consisting of five band members from New Zealand have just started their first international tour, and chose Brisbane to kick it off. The name is certainly a discussion starter, and doesn’t seem to be a bad fit, particularly considering the narrative behind it’s choice.
The band name is, however, perhaps the wrong question that should be asked following their first stop on their first international tour. Indeed, there are many questions that could or should be asked. But we will get to those.
Because I am practicing my industry commentary and feedback structures, we will look to structure this using the foundational sandwich structure, which for those unfamiliar, consists of positive feedback forming the bread of the metaphorical sandwich, and the meat and other garnishes and fillings consisting of the more negative feedback.
I want to be absolutely clear, there were myriad positives from the Where’s Jai gig tonight. It just so happens, that in pushing this metaphor a bit far, that this will be more of a quadruple quarter pounder where the bread is a bit of an afterthought, rather than, say, a big mac where the bread outnumbers the patties. It is definitely not one of those classic KFC doubles where the chicken pieces themselves form the role of the bread itself.
Onto some positives. Where’s Jai have the stage presence of seasoned performers. They do an excellent job of controlling the crowd and the emotions they want them to feel. Their show had a number of ups and downs in an emotional sense, and they had the crowd singing along and dancing.
The song writing is great and they have clearly been through some shit, that gives them that lived experience authenticity that’s near impossible to fake. They also have that effortless rockstar look (seriously all of them do) and are clearly willing to spend time and interact with their fans.
I genuinely enjoyed their set, and they are clearly making waves in the industry with over 21,000 Instagram followers, 19,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and multiple songs with over 200,000 streams with one standout Perfect Crime breaking the two million mark. Their 2025 debut album Fresh Out of Air peaked at number two on the New Zealand top album charts.
Everything points to them being a success and absolutely dominating with their debut international headlining tour. So, it is concerning to see just how far off the rails the backend organisational aspects of this tour is going.
It is unclear who is advising them or managing their tour but the initial signs are not promising. The first questionable choice was the venue and scheduling. Wonderland in Fortitude Valley, isn’t exactly known for it’s live music acts, at least in the genre that Where’s Jai performs. At the end of the day, Wonderland is a night club and is set up around that.
Wonderland is a perfectly serviceable venue in terms of stage, sound production and amenities, as was evidenced by their participation in Big Sound just this week. But it is apparent that live events are not their core business. This manifested a couple of different ways with the gig. First, is the ridiculousness of their underaged attendees policy. Apparently, underage attendees can access the venue for a pre-concert meet and greet, sound check and merch purchasing session yet are not allowed to attend the concert itself. That is pure bullshit. If it was an actual licencing issue, there is no way that the pre-concert meet and greet could have occurred. It is clearly their choice to exclude underage attendees from the concert itself, which begs the question, where the band is comprised primarily with nineteen year olds and presumably has a large teen following, why choose a venue that is unwilling to cater to the all ages crowd?
Secondly, is the timing of the show during Riverfire when the bulk of the city is lining the riverbanks and watching the fireworks and secondly, where there is a hard finish imposed by the venue (9:00pm) because they want to move onto their core business of clubbing.
Where’s Jai, started their set at 8:00pm, pretty much on the dot and they knew how long their set would be with the finish at around 8:52pm. It is perplexing, to say the least, when nearly every band relies heavily on merch sales to actually profit, that they would need to move any post show interaction to outside of the venue (due to timing issues) where merch sales would be next to impossible. Sure, people could have purchased merch before the show, but that ignores fundamental realities of concerts where people don’t really want to be carrying merch through an entire gig, they would rather buy it at the end when they are buoyed by the high of just having listened to their favourite band.
The scheduling as a whole appeared ill-advised. All the tickets stated that doors would open at 6:30pm. This is even though there was a VIP and all ages meet and greet and soundcheck that was scheduled from 6:30 to 7:00pm. So General Admission doors didn’t actually open until 7:20pm, some 50 minutes later than shown on the ticket. Not a big deal really, but generally a detail that experienced tour operators would easily cover off on.
On that point, it seems that each of the Australian tour stops is using a different ticketing partner with Brisbane using FiveAM, Sydney using Moshtix and Melbourne using Oztix. This reeks of an inexperienced band having ticketing partners pushed onto them by venues rather than the band making an already complex tour simpler by using a singular and consistent ticketing operator.
The next question is where were the support act(s)? It was genuinely shocking to realise that no supports had been scheduled at all. This is despite a general call for support suggestions going out via Instagram on 3 August 2026 and doubly perplexing considering Big Sound had concluded just two days ago. Local supports are vital for shoring up the crowd and vibes for a debut headline tour.
Ticket sales for this event appeared to be particularly poor with probably about 40-50 people in attendance, and the area appearing to be equal to or less than a third full. With final release tickets being sold at $35.00 plus booking fee, and unsold VIP tickets, it should not have been a difficult task to locate a local band that fits the sound of Where’s Jai, and who would have been both cheap, and have been good for selling a couple more tickets.
Assume, for instance, you have to pay the support act $500. If they result in more than 15 additional tickets being sold, then you are profiting from their attendance and, lets be honest, if a local support cannot generate more than 15 additional ticket sales, then they aren’t going to succeed as a band. Realistically, your support act should be generating 30-50 additional tickets, so if you find two with limited audience cross over, you’re capable of generating an additional 60-100 tickets or between $1,000 to $2,500 in additional revenue (after support act costs).
Putting aside the additional revenue, an extra 60-100 people in the crowd completely changes the vibe from half-empty to mostly full. The only circumstances where the calculation changes is if you are genuinely going to sell out the venue and even then, if that’s the case, you should still be supporting the local live music scene by booking supports regardless.
The support act route is by far the better option than realising the afternoon of the gig that ticket sales were actually woeful and you are going to instead give away tickets instead, where you tell all ticket purchasers to bring a friend for free.
It also isn’t particularly difficult to find a support act. I don’t even consider myself to be within the industry and corresponding have next to zero connections, but I have utmost confidence that if I had a week’s notice, I could have secured a support act for the concert at a rate and expected additional tickets sold that it would have been a profitable venture. Sure, some of that might be hubris or outright arrogance, but the live music scene is built on exposure deals and considering the type of person it takes to get up on a stage and perform, there is always going to be someone willing to take that deal.
So, what went wrong?
It is unclear how the band has set up their tour and who, if anyone, is mentoring them and providing them advice on the complex, but vitally important, business side of the tour. The band has talent, their success easily speaks to that, but unless they get a competent and experienced music industry professional in their corner that understands the business side of the tour and advises them accordingly, it is difficult to see how this tour could be considered successful, at least from a financial perspective. Ultimately, you could be the best musicians in the world, but if you fail to convert that into actual money, you will never be able to make an actual career out of it. For Where’s Jai, that would be a crying shame.
It is an outright tragedy that Where’s Jai performed to such an empty room tonight. They are way too good for that. The positive (can’t forget the second piece of bread) is that this is the first stop of their very first international tour. They are young, keen and will hopefully soak up the experience like sponges. Some lessons are hard and in the current economy you may get completely fucked by a mistake, but at least they have an opportunity to learn from the experience, and Where’s Jai will no doubt get a crash course in tour management.
The tour will be a journey, one that has multiple stops left and as such, provides copious opportunities for growth and learning to be the complete industry package even if the business side of the tour may not come as easily as the performing side.
It can be hard to ask for help, or to have the self-reflection necessary to realise what you don’t know about an industry. There will be any number of senior industry people who would be willing to help out a band with such abundant promise. You don’t have to learn every single lesson in life by trial and error.
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