Untitled Group and the big business of dance music
Ten years ago, four friends from Melbourne bet it all by launching a New Year’s music festival. Now, Michael Christidis, Nicholas Greco, Filippo Palermo and Christian Serrao are behind Australia’s most influential independent music and events company, Untitled Group, their ticket sales booming while legacy operator struggle to stay afloat. What’s their secret to success?
KESHA TAKES TO the stage in a lipstick-red leotard and matching knee-high boots. The American pop idol best known for her 2010 anthem ‘TiK ToK’ is flanked by muscular back-up dancers wearing leather gimp-dog masks. As the dancers gyrate, the teenage boy next to me lets out a shocked “Whoa”. Kesha showers the crowd in champagne before carefully tossing the bottle into the mosh, the glass shattering upon hitting the ground. After her set, the house-music icon Armand Van Helden arrives, dropping banger after banger of Y2K-era commercial dance music. When he lets his own defining production rip, 1998’s ‘You Don’t Know Me’, multicoloured smoke rockets explode into the sky. Everyone in the audience loses it.
This could be a scene from Beyond the Valley (BTV) music festival, but instead, I’m at the Australian Open’s family-friendly AO Live concert series. While two vastly difference events, both BTV and AO Live are run by a Melbourne-based events collective called Untitled Group. Now 10 years old, Untitled’s AO Live programming – three sold-out nights at John Cain Arena featuring international stars Benson Boone, Kaytranada, Van Helden, Kesha and Australia’s own Bag Raiders – feels symbolic of the group’s rise from teenage dance-music promoters to the biggest independent music events company in Australia.
If you haven’t heard of Untitled Group, chances are, you’ve been to one of its events, or know someone who has. Started by a bunch of Melbourne mates, the group is responsible for staging everything from mega-festivals – Beyond the Valley, Wildlands, Ability Fest and Pitch Music & arts were all conceived by Untitled – to warehouse day parties and headline tours for international acts. At a time when many of Australia’s legacy music festivals are either folding (Bluesfest, Falls Festival and Groovin the Moo have all called it quits in the last few years), or in perpetual postponement (Splendour in the Grass recently announced a second successive festival-less year), Untitled Group has flourished and expanded while its competitors have struggled.
The question is, how?
At AO Live, the day before Kesha transforms John Cain Arena into a sweaty dance floor, I sit down with one of Untitled’s co-founders, Michael Christidis. It’s a hot Melbourne evening and the 31-year-old is chipper despite being mid-recovery from a dust-induced chest infection acquired at Untitled’s Beyond the Valley New Year’s festival. “I had been on, like 12 planes in three weeks, and I just was not slowing down,” says Christidis. “I got parainfluenza virus and it ripped apart my lungs.”
As a group, the Untitled founders present as four young men you might see at any dance-music festival or day party. Which makes sense, because this is exactly how they got their start.
AS 17-YEAR-OLD nightclub promoters, Christidis and Filippo Palermo would frequent the grounds of Melbourne’s universities, hawking tickets to the biggest dance-music festivals of the day, from Stereosonic to Future Music Festival. They were good salesmen, delivering up to $150,000 worth of ticket sales in cash-stuffed backpacks to the festival promoters, keeping $5-10 per ticket – a haul of about $10,000 for a big event like Stereo.
Not only did they love dance music, understood that kids just like them would part with money to attend big events with strong lineups. But their entrepreneurialism didn’t end there. Following a day of ticket selling, ‘Toby’ and ‘Mitch’ (as per their fake IDs at the time) would sneak into Melbourne’s Tramp Bar, where Palermo would be paid to DJ. It’s here they met Nicholas Greco, a promoter who invited the duo to host their own night club.
“We told him we were underage. He laughed and said, ‘Finish high school and we’ll launch when you’re in university next year,” recalls Christidis. Greco would eventually become Untitled Group’s third member.
Shortly after two became three, Christidis, Palermo and Greco were joined by Christian Serrao, another young club promoter from Melbourne. Together, they launched their own club night and formed a superclub called Anyway at the Palace Theatre in 2013, a night that moved around town after the Palace closed in April 2014, stopping at popular venues The Bottom End and La Di Da, better known by the name of its most popular club night, Pony, which Untitled replaced. That same year, they officially founded the company that would land them in Forbes‘ 30 Under 30 class of 2023: Untitled Group.
Beyond the Valley was the group’s first festival, with the inaugural edition also happening in 2014. On the lineup edition was Action Bronson, AlunaGeorge, Dillon Francis, Midnight Juggernauts and a then-unknown Melbourne DJ by the name of Dom Dolla. “We were four kids basically putting on a multimillion-dollar project, with no experience running a festival,” Greco says. “It was trial by fire that whole year. We learnt so much. We lost so much money from that first event. I guess the rick has paid off now, but at that moment, it was terrifying.” According to Greco, the group lost more than $1 million on BTV’s debut. But the boys persisted, and sold more than the year before. (In 2016, sales virtually doubled again to hit 35,000.)
But when it came to the New Year’s window, BTV had serious competition, with neighbouring Falls Festival – still very much in its prime – locking down the biggest global acts. In 2019, desperate to book Tyler, the Creator and Rüfüs Du Sol, both of whom were being chased by Falls, Untitled Group launched Wildlands in Brisbane, a city that had been without a major New Year’s Eve festival, to secure those artists for additional dates. Wildlands has since expanded to Adelaide and Perth. Across the 2024-25 New Year’s period, Untitled sold more than 125,000 tickets across BTV and Wildlands.
After Beyond the Valley, the group’s next big flagship event was the dance music-exclusive festival Pitch Music & Arts. Debuting in 2017 in Moyston, Victoria, at the base of the Grampians, Pitch stood out from other local festivals via its architectural stages and visual-art installations.
“[Pitch 2017] felt like the first Euro-style lineup in Australia. It felt unprecedented in the festival landscape and a turning point in my mind,” Raag Bhatia, a renowned booker at Miscellania, one of Melbourne’s most progressively programmed and popular nightclubs, tells me. “They paved the way for big dance-music events like Boiler Room x Sugar Mountain and Novel’s new A3 festival, further bridging the worlds of the semi-commercial and the underground.”
Pitch has grown from 7,500 attendees in 2017 to 18,000 in 2025 on the strength of dizzying lineups and large-scale production values. The 2024 version featured some impressive gets: stalwart German producer and DJ Marcel Dettmann played alongside hard techno DJ of the moment, France’s I Hate Models. But it also marked the festival’s most challenging outing yet, as it experienced the wrath of what has become one of the modern music festival’s biggest threats: extreme weather conditions. Soaring temperatures and fire warnings saw the Country Fire Authority advice attendees to stay away or leave, but the festival wasn’t officially cancelled until its third day. Media outlets criticised Untitled for not cancelling sooner (it maintains it strictly followed CFA guidance), and for understaffing that meant volunteers were left to supervise serious medical emergencies ahead of the arrival of qualified medical personnel. Tragically, Antony Maugeri, a 23-year-old Niddrie man, was found unresponsive and airlifted to The Alfred Hospital, where he later died.
Following an internal review, Untitled Group introduced new measures for Pitch 2025, including hiring a bushfire behaviour specialist and bolstering mid-festival communication via expanded WiFi coverage. And following a Victorian government drug-testing trial at Beyond the Valley 2024, Pitch 2025 adopted the same facility.
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO TALK about the rise of Untitled Group without acknowledging the recent surge in popularity of dance music across Australia. Last year, the dance music industry body International Music Summit used Spotify monthly listener statistics to determine that, per capita, Australians listen to more dance music than any other country. Also last year, SoundCloud revealed a third of all Australian SoundCloud streams are for electronic music, compared to a 22 per cent global average. Beginning as nightclub promoters in the dance music space, it’s no great coincidence that Untitled Group would be riding – or helping to drive (depending on whom you ask) – the commercial success of the genre Down Under.
Of course, success doesn’t come without tension, and the commercialisation of the genre doesn’t sit well with all purists. From its inception, dance music has been a countercultural, artistic movement. Those who believe they’re continuing that legacy see small dance floors as sites of personal and political expression – as spaces for community building more so than hedonistic bacchanals. Understandably, they are wary of the group’s rapid growth.
If you spend enough time in and around Melbourne dance floors, you’ll hear the same grievances repeated: Untitled Group’s buying power is pricing out smaller operators and pushing up artist fees across the board; the group’s success no longer makes it the best recipient of government grants.
But from a business perspective, Untitled is simply doing a better job of capitalising on the same financial and regulatory environment within which every other music event organiser must operate. It’s part of a changing of the guard, occupying the space of the big operators it once worked for. You could also argue that rising artist fees are just as attributable to dance music’s occupation of the musical zeitgeist.
“We’ve been self-funded up to this point,” says Christidis. “We’re for shareholders only. Then you’ve got Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster, who acquired Splendour in the Grass and Falls Festival and who own Spilt Milk. You’ve got Ticketek, which owns Laneway, and they’ve got a parent investor, Silver Lake, overseas. Then you’ve got Frontier, who’s partnered with AEG, which are the producers of Coachella,” adds the co-founder, running through the group’s Australian competition and their backers. “I think there’s also something about being independent, the underdogs. People like supporting Australian-owned and Australian-made.
“I think sometimes Australia can be very harsh and cruel to people that are doing their best,” he continues. “I think the more that we just celebrate lifting each other up as a community, which I think we’re very lucky people have done for us, the better it will be.”
For the record, by “self-funded”, Christidis means Untitled has, to date, accepted no external funding from investors or partners, though it has received various government grants since 2020 in connection with specific events, as have its festival competitors. (These grants include $277,410 from RISE Fund for Wildlands in 2022; $100,000 from Live Music Australia for Pitch Music & Arts in 2023; and $500,000 from the Victorian Government Regional Events Fund in 2024.) The reality is, Untitled Group is no longer the underdog. It self-describes as Australia’s largest independently owned music and events company, selling more than 500,000 tickets to events annually. Meanwhile, others in the scene have an overwhelmingly positive take on the group’s flow-on effects. Nergal Youkhana has been booking DJs for about 15 years, seven of those at Melbourne’s crucial techno basement Sub Club, and now also at Sydney’s relaunched Chinese Laundry. He says Untitled’s festivals enable him to book artists he’d otherwise have trouble securing.
“Pitch or BTV take on the majority of the fees of international artists and it gives smaller spaces like ours access,” says Youkhana, pointing to German DJ-producer Objekt, who will play Sub Club for a Pitch sideshow in March. “When it comes to underground music, these artists blowing up to the mainstage still want to be connected to the club world and we provide that connection to the roots.”
On a personal level, nobody can take away from Christidis and his colleagues that their love for the music is as much of a driving force as their commercial aspirations. Christidis calls out late-aughts electro DJs, producers and VJs like Booka Shade, Justice and Naysayer & Gilsun as early influences.
The first gig he attended was The Presets at Festival Hall, screaming along to ‘My People’ on the band’s Apocalypso tour. Eight years later, the experience came full circle. “I was 24 and we chose The Presets to bring in New Year’s Eve [at BTV]. I just remember storming into their dressing room and going, ‘That was the best countdown ever!’ I was so ecstatic. Problem is, I gave no context of who I was,” he jokes.
Nor can the group’s support of the local music industry be disputed. Every year (bar 2023), Untitled has booked a local act to countdown BTV’s New Year’s clock. A lesser-known fact: Untitled Group has also been instrumental in raising the profile of local electronic musicians and DJs, most notably their school friend Dom Dolla, who’s played every BTV festival since the event’s inception – and broken records for success.
Yes, its rise is enmeshed with the growth of dance music. But Untitled is no longer just a dance-music events company. BTV still has an electronically focused lineup, but it’s also booking live acts and, increasingly, pop legacy acts and current chart toppers: Nelly Furtado, Natasha Bedingfield and Ice Spice have all appeared in recent years – in 2024, they brought out Christina Aguilera for a Victorian exclusive in conjunction with the state’s Always Live program. And the group is branching out into avenues beyond music, investing in youth news platform The Daily Aus and launching its Ugly Vodka brand.
Untitled Group’s expansion over the past decade is clear evidence that they’ve fully transcended their teenage origin story. No longer simply dance-music promoters, they’re the architects of the modern Australian music festival in the way the Big Day Out was in the ’90s and Splendour in the Grass was for most of the 2000s.
Legacy festivals may be struggling to maintain relevance, but if you ask the Untitled crew, they’ll tell you: the business of bass is booming.
This story appears in the March/April 2025 issue of Esquire Australia with the title “The Big Business of Bass”, on sale now. Find out where to buy the issue here.
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