This is a really tiny thing but it’s part of a big step for us and I’m really proud of what’s starting to come together.

Today SydneyMusic.net published the debut of a new series called "Pick & Mix". It's one of many new article formats that we're going to be rolling out in the coming weeks ("Buy Some Music" is another - we talked to 9 record stores about their favourite local releases - take a read)

"Pick & Mix" is a simple bit of good ol' plain text writing according to a brief and structure. When we commission these pieces, we ask the artist/curator/facilitator/writer/figure/enthusiast to write according to a brief (in this case, it's "5 things that you rate that you want others to know about - of any sort").

To kick things off, we invited Annabelle Scobie - an artist that we think rules and is part of an important scene (explore the GIRLINEORA cinematic universe if you haven't, I shot some film at an early show).

The purpose of this piece is context. We want to help our scene be more discoverable, but that includes helping people to understand where it's coming from as well. If we want people to develop deep relationships with artists, their stories need to be documented. This isn't happening outside of social media, and it's a problem.

This format gives a user the opportunity to access the context of an artist in a world they can be a part of too. Examples in this case include a recording studio! a video shoot location! some super authentic tone of voice about life as an artist! a reference to a really special Collarbones show!

It all adds a tiny bit of data to the currently largely undocumented world of the underground in Australia. Barely any of this world is being visibly communicated or written about outside of social media, and even that is pretty thin on the ground - you'll occasionally find artist profiles, but even for more established artists, there is a distinct lack of in-depth writing compared to what there used to be. We're poorer for it.

In Scobie's case, apart from an FBi Radio profile and interview, I haven't been able to find anything. She's an artist that's gigged extensively, has multiple releases to her name, does genuinely great stuff and is a great live performer. How is there not more visibility being given to credible artists with great work? This is a widespread problem: the 23 shows we booked in 24 weeks was an exercise in booking acts without looking at streams and social following. Every single artist was incredible and one I would wholeheartedly encourage everyone to go and see. With a couple of exceptions there are very few names you will have heard of. This underground is being overlooked by the vast majority of Australia.

Annabelle has written some profoundly good songs - cat allergy and frank are both gobsmacking. Her productions for other artists have insane range. Yet I haven’t been able to find a single thing written or produced about her apart from that FBi piece. And even if we had blogs, they're incredibly isolated (so are podcasts, for that matter). We need more significant amplification of the underground.

* * *

It's clear many people people don't want social media. We heard it overwhelmingly in our survey last month, where 194 respondents told us how they felt about SydneyMusic.net. Many people actively called out Instagram in particular for ruining the scene by making it harder to navigate. A lot of people use streaming - 78.9% of SydneyMusic users primarily listen to streaming services, but 36% of SydneyMusic's users that primarily listen to streaming wish they were listening to something else.

It's also clear that people don't want what the web has become. The internet is now a cesspit of pop-overs, pop-ups, nag screens, paywalls, bad search, despicably bad ad tech (seriously, the industry should be ashamed of itself), declining writing - and all of it is clinging to a shrinking pool of revenue. Somewhere along the way, proper writing about artists got forgotten. We consistently get rave reviews for the cleanness and speed of the website.

The problem is no one wants to pay for anything. You don't have to, so the barrier to entry is not there. Social media will do. We hate it, but we use it.

So, the free product SydneyMusic.net's traffic is steadily increasing. We recently notched 20,500 UBs (unique browsers) - and it's rising consistently. (By the way, 48.5% of surveyed users say they primarily use the website, 47.9% primarily use our Instagram, and the rest use our weekly e-mail newsletter)

It's super clear that people love us. Our traffic growth has happened by itself. We received a "World Class" rating of 82 via the de facto industry standard Net Promoter Score (NPS) score ("How likely is it that you would recommend SydneyMusic.net to a friend or colleague?") - in my 15 years of working in product, I've never heard of a score of 82. We're super pumped.

Securing sustainable funding, on the other hand, is proving more difficult. But if this investment helps drive engagement with our scene, we'll have done our job.

* * *

We’re kind of betting the SydneyMusic farm on editorial and I think there’s a really promising glimmer of what contributing to storytelling about a too-often-forgotten (and increasingly so) underground can do that playlisting won’t.

This Scobie piece that we just published is not going to revolutionise the music industry by itself. It's just a tiny piece of a much bigger framework for SydneyMusic's editorial strategy, and we want to kickstart a movement towards making our scene visible - something that we hope to only play a small role in.

Our strategy relies strongly on publishing evergreen writing. No news hits, no PR recycling. Content is expensive and we don't have the resources to track time sensitive information outside of gigs. What we're doing gives some identity to the scene, and it allows different community figures to speak on their own terms.

Over time, if we gather enough of this writing, as a total resource it can more comprehensively enrich the discoverability of our critically important music ecosystem, as well as document it for historical value.

We have an engagement problem with local music. This is one way to help try and bring that back.

* * *

If you like what we're doing here, please consider supporting SydneyMusic.net financially:

• Join our Patreon, from $5 per month

• Purchase something from our store - including our awesome tees

Holy fucking shit.

After debuting their first track "Late" back in April last year, Sadie recently dropped their first proper release "For Youth, For Sparks, Forever", released via Bandcamp and on cassette (instantly extremely sold out)

It's incredible. It's going to be one of the best Australian releases of the year. It's got jangle, it's got texture, it's got emotion, it's got twists and surprises. This honestly surpassed my expectations and they were already extremely high.

I'm not going to wax lyrical. Just go and listen to the release.

(For this story, you’ll need a copy of this PDF which came up in a Google search.)

Here’s a yarn for you.

Creative Australia gave $150,000 to ARIA and Roving Enterprises to produce a weekly series of content posts to "promote Australian artists". The program was supposed to run for 8 months (which I estimate will be finished by the end of March)

That $150k, as far as I can tell, did not need to receive any peer assessment on its merits. The full amount was approved in a one-line email sent - from Hawaii - by Creative Australia CEO Adrian Collette (see page 21).

The result - called "ARIA Amplified" - appears to have grown virtually zero audience. Every platform seems to have at max 100s (sometimes the low 1000s) of views - YouTube, TikTok, Instagram - with a couple of minor exceptions that still aren't remotely success stories when you think about all of the label and artist teams that would be boosting these pieces. I'm told that Amplified was also run for a week or two on Nine's Today Show, but it was then dropped. It also seems there has been some cross-promotion on Network 10's The Project as well.

I began to assemble a detailed table of how poorly all of these posts have performed, but I'm one blogger and I don't have that much time to spend on this. I encourage you to go to the accounts directly and see for yourself. To have metrics this low for posts about household name artists: in no way can this be seen to be a success.

ARIA CEO Annabelle Herd (formerly a Network 10 executive) has been hyping the initiative on LinkedIn, which appears to be where the program has easily had the biggest response (not to the content, just people talking about it)

The format is abysmal: a disjointed, narrative-less sequence of “news” stories with the soundtrack largely overridden by an exhausting barrage of “pop” notification sounds as they try to highlight Australian artists… commenting on Instagram posts…?

It’s clear that there has been no philosophy of audience building present in this endeavour. I think I can say with confidence: no punter asked for any of this, and yet it gets hand-waved as a budget approval without a second’s hesitation. Who knows what the total budget was once they got AMEX onboard as a primary sponsor? Did the member labels contribute money to this project, or is it just free advertising for multinational companies? And why, oh why, has the format and approach not been evolved when the metrics are this bad?

More revealing, though, is that this is clearly the view that major labels now have of their ecosystem: the whole thing is a conversation about chart performance and social media, informed by their analytics dashboards. It spends very little time talking or reflecting on the actual work which is, you know, the music. If you cared about the music, you wouldn't shit on it with a bunch of "pop" sounds.

Who gets amplified?

I was interested in ARIA's view of who this was seeking to benefit. Fortunately the PDF contains all of their partner messaging, so we don't have to look far. I can't see any evidence that these sections are confidential, so I'm going to reproduce them.

Interesting. Alright, there's a pretty weak but definitely present egalitarian statement of intent: indies get a shoutout, and diversity and representation is on the menu.

ARIA says itself at the top of its "About Us" page: (emphasis mine)

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) is a national industry association proactively representing the interests of its members. We have 195 members ranging from small "boutique" labels typically run by 1-5 people, to medium size organisations and very large companies with international affiliates.

I compiled a list of every news headline to try and figure where we stood on that "diversity" piece, and made a start on identifying the companies that represented the artists listed (CSV format, pull requests are welcome to help me complete this).

After I spent some time reviewing each of these stories I realised the result was pretty boring: it's clear that out of 246 "news" stories, just about every single one is for an artist represented by a major label or promoter. You could possibly split hairs on a couple that were on indie imprints (but still distributed by a major) - but even these could be counted on one hand. This does not seem to reflect what ARIA is at pains to point out in the quote above - that they represent the indies as well as the big fish.

There are some tenuously "Australian" acts, but upon reflection I don't think we need to make too big a deal of it - acts like The Last Dinner Party (have an Australian member), Rosé (Kiwi/Korean but lived in Australia) and Stray Kids (Korean but have a couple of Australian members) - there's an argument to be made that they are examples of Australian musicians crushing it overseas.

But then I am wondering what Music Australia thinks of running a story like "The Kid LAROI’s Aperol Spritz joins the tangerine trend". Riveting stuff.

As one insider reflected on the phone to me, "why wouldn't you be talking about Vacations if you wanted to discuss an Australian success story?" - which I think really gets to the guts of just how much they've missed.

ARIA has always been a commercial representative body, but indies still are a critical part of their ecosystem. Even the huge number of artists represented by the majors should be incredibly pissed off by that list, as it's such a poorly representative list. It's clear that some artists are getting a lot of attention, while many (so many!) amazing artists - on majors and indies alike - are being overlooked, despite huge successes and amazing work that deserves to be celebrated.

To ignore this is to, well, have things be where they are today - where very little Australian music makes any meaningful impact commercially, and where it appears that ARIA - even when given a significant amount of money by the government to do so - don't know how to market Australian music.

This is a terrible look for ARIA

Don’t try and get ARIA to recognise any of their role in this problem. Herd’s soundbites offer nothing more than handwringing sighs. Here she is speaking to The Music Network a couple of months ago:

“A lack of Australian artists reflected in the end of year charts is unfortunately not new news. Given the long discourse between ARIA, the industry and media around this and what can be done to shift it, the annual chart result should come as no surprise.”

No - I call bullshit. And this series proves it. You got $150,000 of free money, a global sponsor and all of the firepower of the major labels - and you couldn’t produce something to excite anyone on the very platforms that we all acknowledge currently make or break the careers of artists.

In Closing

We're at a crisis point where the top end of the Australian music industry looks completely out of touch, and pretty divorced from where the actual energy (and the amazing stories!) exist in the scene. Sometimes it feels like the big players see themselves in competition with the indies. It's hard to not feel like that's the case looking at that CSV file.

So my thoughts:

• ARIA: figure out how to actually uplift the scene. This is bad, and we urgently need better. Don't tell us that audiences aren't listening when this is your best effort at communicating.

• And to Creative Australia, I have questions: what accountability does ARIA receive for the outcomes and impact of this funding allocation? How many other discretionary approvals are given?

I want a healthy music industry. We need it, just as much as they need the grassroots (and need to recognise it).

But if Australia's most influential industry figures are going to collectively drop the ball this badly with a free $150,000, we need to talk about why.

UPDATE 10/3 20:14: It was pointed out that Rosé and Stray Kids still have Australian connections and there's a valid case to be made for including them. I've updated the relevant paragraph to reflect that.

I’ll be honest, I’ve just been too burnt out to organise anything for it. It’s pretty hard to not feel like I have anything left to engage in celebration. This project's taken so fucking much.

I have so many dreams for it: I want it to find ways to help everyone - especially the people that don't yet know how amazing our local music communities are - get absolutely pumped for this amazing scene.

And there's the storytelling. There's the celebration of talent, the thoughts of leaders, the context-setting of scenes and subcultures, the experiences of the wise. We have got to do more to help people understand why being a musician is so fucking hard, but more importantly we just need to get out and fucking support. That means being part of your local underground community, not going to more shows at the Enmore. The underground is hurting more. This isn't a conversation. Stop it, it isn't.

If you have a better underground, you'll save your precious industry. Stop clutching your pearls over festival closures and snap to fucking reality. We need to think about systemic, holistic health. Punters aren't going to shows. We have a demand problem. People have stopped caring. And yet all I can see is build-it-and-they-will-come plans that still have economic output as the primary measure of success, or just a general sense that funding is going to save us. It's not going to work.

The work of SydneyMusic is really fucking important, I'm convinced of it. Our growth has been astonishing. The Instagram account has grown from 3,000 to over 10,000 in exactly a year. The website now gets 20,000 unique browsers a month, and it's rising every month. The stories are constant. 78% of people see more live music because of us. 79% of people discover new music because of us. People don't know what they'd use if we stopped existing. They want us to exist.

I just didn't expect it to be this hard.

At every breakthrough there have been another few roadblocks. There have been all manner of things to overcome - limited time and energy being chief amongst them. Trying to do middle management while contributing to a 30-hour-a-week workload on the site didn't work, and it caused immense burnout. Trying to juggle building a sustainable but flexible personal income that enables me to spend time getting SydneyMusic sustainable while spending more time with my kids has been incredibly difficult to achieve - especially in the state I started, and the context switching and reactive environment has done my head in.

I'm so fucking tired. I just need a fucking holiday - like a proper 4 week holiday where I get to zone out. My head constantly feels like I'm on fire, the stress just feels like a dull roar, like tinnitus or a beach shack right on the beach. I'm sick of not seeing my kids. I'm sick of staying inside because I'm so broke. I'm sick of wanting to just keep going another couple of months because we're so close.

I'm so done. And yet I don't want to give up, because I want this for us. I know it's making the scene better. I hear the stories every time I walk out my door. It's wonderful.

I just wish it wasn't so hard.