QMusic CEO Kris Stewart has announced he is stepping down, in a sudden move that comes within hours of a detailed briefing being submitted by this writer to news.com.au outlining long-running concerns about governance, transparency, and the allocation of commercial opportunities within the organisation.
The Queensland Music Awards are scheduled to be held in three weeks.
His departure follows this year’s earlier resignations of President Viv Mellish and Vice-President John Collins and comes amid formal complaints to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission and sustained scrutiny from industry stakeholders led by this masthead.
This moment did not arrive suddenly. It follows years of unresolved concerns — and a growing number of industry participants deciding that silence was no longer tenable.
At the centre of those concerns has been the repeated allocation of valuable media and publicity opportunities linked to QMusic’s flagship events, BIGSOUND and the Queensland Music Awards. Over an extended period, those opportunities appear to have been concentrated with a single connected party, without a process that was visible, open, or competitive to the broader industry.
These contracts carry real commercial and reputational value. In other major Australian markets, such opportunities typically circulate among a competitive ecosystem. In Queensland, several independent PR firms have confirmed they would have pursued these contracts had they been given the opportunity, describing them as commercially significant. This raises a central question: whether the opportunity to compete was ever meaningfully accessible.
Concerns of this nature were raised directly with QMusic leadership on multiple occasions over several years. Responses were limited, often delayed, and did not provide detailed clarification around process or decision-making.
Eventually, those concerns moved beyond private correspondence. They were published on this website, shared among members, and in 2025 escalated to the national regulator, The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, “ACNC”.
Multiple stakeholders submitted complaints to the ACNC, raising questions about governance, transparency, and the allocation of funds within a publicly supported not-for-profit.
The sequence of developments is difficult to ignore.
In June 2024, scenestr published an exposé detailing concerns around contract allocation and calling for leadership accountability, including the resignation of the President and Stewart. Within weeks, then-President Natalie Strijland and Vice President D-J Wendt resigned – having only weeks earlier been re-elected at the AGM.
In June 2025, two weeks after a series of independent complaints to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission — including one from this publication — Kris Stewart took an immediate and previously unannounced five-month leave of absence, departing in the lead-up to – and during – his delivery of BIGSOUND.
QMusic has not publicly connected these events, and may not choose to. But within the industry, the timing — and the consistency of these developments — has not gone unnoticed.
Recent months have also seen movement at an operational level, including the advertising of a senior marketing role linked to the 2023 event cycle in which media and publicity arrangements were concentrated.
More to come ...
