Adelaide City Council & AJ Maddah Are Trading Blows Over Soundwave Debt

Beleaguered promoter AJ Maddah is caught in a war of words with Adelaide City Council over the circumstances of Soundwave Festival's final, ill-fated outing in 2015.

The saga began earlier this week when Adelaide's Advertiser reported that the council was waiving Soundwave's remaining debt to the city, totalling $75,391, after it was ascertained that no further payments would be forthcoming from the liquidated Soundwave Festival Pty Ltd.

Administrators had managed to secure 2c in the dollar for creditors, amounting to a total repayment of $1529, but with no additional funds to draw upon, the council — or moreover, taxpayers — have borne the brunt of Soundwave's failure.

Despite the move essentially relieving him of further responsibility, Maddah then unleashed an extraordinary tirade against the Adelaide City Council in a statement to Music Feeds, evidently unhappy about being positioned as a burden on average South Australian citizens.

It bears mentioning that the amount being written off as bad debt is actually a small fraction of the city's overall costs in its annual financial reports, though Soundwave's contribution to the bad debt total itself is relatively hefty.

In 2016, Adelaide spent $185,000 in clearing bad/doubtful debts, which themselves form part of the larger $7.6 million subtotal for prescribed expenses under Materials, Contracts & Other Expenses for the city; including other expenses under that banner, it's part of a broader $79.1 million expenditure. 

In the statement, Maddah described the evident economic benefit Soundwave brought to the city — including "jobs to thousands of South Australians, hiring thousand[s] of hotel rooms, rental cars, close to $1 million in backstage catering supplied locally … and incidentally provided entertainment for South Australian youth" — while decrying "ridiculous Adelaide City Council charges" and the fact that he believes the city "constantly punished Soundawve for being a successful event".

Among his accusations — which included the allegation that "council staff, including elected officials, abused the festival's hospitality" by demanding unpaid privileges for their children — he claimed the council had "doubl[ed] and quadrupl[ed] the rent at [event venue] Bonython Park" and gone on to charge "close to 10 times what it charged for other events that used the park".

Now, Adelaide City Council has refuted that claim, providing a statement that says the festival "paid normal rates to use the space as per our rates schedule, plus standard remediation costs which are charged to all event organisers who use the Park Lands and Squares to ensure they are returned to their pre-event state".

"The City of Adelaide is very supportive of live music and works to proactively support and promote music events in the city," the statement explained. "Council has an approval process in place to ensure that each event application is assessed and determined as being consistent with the requirements of the relevant Community Land Management Plan, the Adelaide Park Lands Management Strategy and the Adelaide Park Lands Event Management Plan. All event applications are assessed against the same criteria."

"All events are charged site fees in accordance with our endorsed Park Lands event site fees, which are endorsed by Council annually," they added.

It should be noted that in 2015-16, Adelaide Park Lands event fees were charged on a per-person basis, as opposed to the overall area overtaken by the event (as in 2016-17 fee schedule). Soundwave's 2015 Adelaide event notoriously fell short of attendance expectations, bringing 12,000 people through the gates — just over half the previous year's attendance of 20,000.

Despite that, total Park Lands event fees income did increase year-on-year from 2013-14 and 2014-15, with the council pulling in $490,000 and $617,000 from all events in those periods respectively.