Clearly there's a memory gap in this blog. Not really the time to fill it. You'll pick up some of the developments below, from this interview with Dani Zhang and Tanita Razaghi on FBi Radio's Saturday morning current affairs program Backchat. This team rules: every conversation I've had with them has been a banger — super thoughtful research ahead of time, great questions, great exploration. FBi is important. Support them.
If you're reading this on the day I'm posting it, happy King Street Crawl day. It's a brilliant celebration of a really huge chunk of our scene — it's been too long away, a huge effort to pull together and I hope it continues.
Caitlin and I will be DJing at the Vic on the Park from 3pm—5pm, and Bootleggers @ Kelly's On King from 5pm—7pm. DJing for everyone coming through for Behind You is getting me very excited. See you in the pit.
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You can listen to the audio recording of this interview on FBi's Backchat program page or on SydneyMusic's Soundcloud (14 mins 23 secs).
FBi Radio: A few weeks back, we brought you the sad news that free independent local gig guide SydneyMusic.net was shutting its virtual doors (boo) — but today we're here on a much happier note: the news that SydneyMusic.net lives on.
Earlier this week, the gig guide made the announcement that it was “55.3% saved”, which is a pass grade if you ask me. We're joined in studio by co-founder Joe Hardy. Joe, welcome back to the studio.
JH: Hey, thanks for having me.
FBi: For those who didn't hear, SydneyMusic.net put out a release in early June announcing its imminent closure after a rough six months, that was then pushed out by another four weeks. Would you give us the latest update please?
Yeah, sure. It's been a pretty eventful five weeks. We've had an overwhelming response from people wanting to see what they can do at all of their different levels of resourcefulness and available amounts of energy — that's ranged from individuals to organisations to companies to everything in between. It's been really cool.
We've had a lot of conversations, but amongst all of that, of course, is that anything being presented to you could be any number of parts of a solution — but how does the solution fit together overall? And so [there’s been] a lot of uncertainty over those five weeks.
We finally got to the point where — I think “pass grade” is probably a good way of putting it really — I think we just kind of went, “I think we're over the line of the required momentum and a sense of groundswell appearing”, and that gave us the confidence to go, “let's give this a crack”.
Did anything specifically happen over the last few weeks or was it just like a slow buildup that got you over the point?
It was definitely a slow buildup. Probably the most significant — and it was an early development, but it wasn't enough on its own — but RØDE Microphones reached out and said “what do you need and what can we do?” I think that's a great way to start. And so we just talked really openly [over some] some emails back and forth. Heaps Normal also got in touch and said the same. We just really appreciated the way that they engaged with it and the fact that there was a really sincere interest in the organisation.
So yeah, we kind of used the confidence that their gestures… I guess they’re a bit of a wedge that kind of helped us to go, “okay, well if we build on top of this…” — RØDE offered core monthly funding for two years, so a portion of our budget, a small percentage of our budget, but still a significant one. And that just kind of meant, “okay, well, if we model out how things might look with all of these other factors involved, it seems like this has got more of a shot”.
We mentioned that our recurring monthly giving increased from something like 12% to that 55% number, and that was largely thanks to RØDE and Heaps Normal's involvement, [along with] a whole bunch of other people that also sought to see what they could do. It wasn't all monetary, it was so much more than that, but we definitely felt the love.
Wow. Huge shout out to RØDE and Heaps Normal then.
Really, for real. Yeah.
One of the biggest issues facing gig guides, and one of the things that SydneyMusic.net specifically set out to fight against, is that no one has really found out a sustainable way to maintain them. What has kept you guys going so far? I mean, you touched on a little — like, great sponsors that are showing curiosity …
Yeah, I think the real thing that keeps us going is just the overwhelming sense that it needs to exist. We've thought about shutting down the project many times before this particular occasion — it's been a pretty hard run.
At the end of the day, one of the things that's really compelled us is just that we wouldn't know what we'd use if it didn't exist. And that's a really sobering thought, obviously, because we spent a lot of time knowing what is going on and our network and our peers likewise do the same. And I think all of us in our conversations feel really strongly that there aren't a lot of elegant solutions to this problem, and ours isn't… we haven't solved the problem. We've just contributed to how we explore how to solve the problem.
What keeps us going… it's mostly knowing that people use it, that people love it, that it gets more people out to shows. We really feel the precarity of the sustainability of live music right now, and we just know… I firmly believe that our primary problem with live music in Sydney is a demand issue. We don't have enough demand for live music, so we need to get more people out to shows.
As part of this new era, SydneyMusic.net will be doing partnerships for the first time. What were the kind of, I guess, pros and cons that were running through your heads when you were deciding to even consider that and then make the decision to go into that?
Right. Partnerships were always on the table, but what we were very aware of was that particularly advertising and commercial consideration was the reason why gig guides declined.
We used to have a golden age of gig guides and they were advertising supported. Fairfax had their own lift out gig guide which was massive: the Green Guide. We had multiple street press publications like Brag and Drum Media and 3D World, and all of those kinds of titles — they don't exist anymore. Or if they do exist, we don't associate those names with gig guides, right? We don't even really associate those names with how to find culture, certainly not at a local level. And there is a reason for that.
Ultimately what we witnessed over the last couple of decades was gradual deterioration of these resources, and it was because commercial consideration got in the way of what they should have been prioritising — which is the grassroots in all of its presence. Instead, it was about: “what can we potentially get advertising dollars from?” and then your content strategy then prioritises those kinds of sources. So it was a really sad decline to watch that happen.
We have both worked in and around music for a long time, and we just kind of went “what would need to be at the core of a project to not have it experience that deterioration or that decline over time?” And so we had a long think about CPM-based advertising and went, “that's probably part of the problem”. And so we've just been working since then to get our heads around how we might be able to create a sustainable organisation that isn't going to experience that sort of breakdown.
Okay. Very interesting. Let us know if you come up with anything. I think that's a bit of new territory that you guys are trying to break into.
It's always been a topic of discussion. Look, a big reason why we didn't develop a sponsorship model is just because it takes time to build a sponsorship model. You've got to validate it, you've got to model it. You've got to figure out, you've got to do a lot of testing with the market, figure out whether your pricing is well positioned, whether people feel like they're getting value for what you're offering them.
We want to start a really respectful conversation with brands where we aren't just giving them logo consideration, but we're actually giving them an opportunity to share why they care about live music at a community level in Sydney. That's a very loose thought bubble that's in our heads right now, but I think that's the organising principle we want to work with.
We think that we can do it a bit differently from just creating lots of space for people to flash their logo. I think we can do better than that. And certainly the conversations we've been having with the current brands that have shown trust in us is that they are really open to finding new ways to do this, and that's so exciting. The fact that we can actually form this in the coming weeks — because we don't have a sponsorship model, that's the next step — and they're going to help us to shape that and give us feedback and stuff. So that's brilliant.
Love that. If you've just tuned in, you’re listening to Backchat on FBi. We’re here with Joe Hardy talking about SydneyMusic.net.
Joe, one of SydneyMusic's founding principles was “hyperlinks, not algorithms” — another was ”helping music compete with the attention economy”. Do you have any new principles that you've added over the lifetime of the project?
Right, yeah. So that's a reference to — I think we have something like 10 or 11 “principles” that we created within the first five days of the project kicking off. They've just lived in my Notes app. I actually don't think we've even put them in our proper document storage or anything, they've just lived in my Notes app and we refer to them every now and again.
“Hyperlinks not algorithms” was Caitlin's line. Something we talked a lot about was how algorithms non-transparently change the dynamics of the information that is being shared on platforms that rely on algorithmic media. And what we'd been reflecting on was the fact that the original design principles of the internet relied on hyperlinks, which were very human-directed. So, someone could contextualise some information by adding a link within it, and then it would link to another resource, and then that could augment the point that they were trying to make, or provide additional context, or give someone a jumping off point to continue exploring … so the original design principles of the internet were super user-driven, right? There was none of this kind of “lean back”, just-take-in-the-feed-and-keep-scrolling kind of thing. You decided where you went.
That's when I got onto the internet. I started building websites when I was about 11. My first website was called “Joseph's Muso Home Page”, and within a couple of weeks I was getting emails from around the world of people that were interested in the sorts of music stuff that I was into.
And so when I sat down in front of a blank code editor to do “something” which became SydneyMusic, I was really thrown back to that experience that I had as an 11-year-old and how different the Internet felt and how much more positively impactful it was on my life, and wondering whether we could bring some of that purity back to the project that we were doing here.
And so those principles of which “hyperlinks not algorithms” was one, they've never changed, and I suspect we won't change them. There are a couple of things in there where we've actually gone, “wow, that makes it a little bit harder for us”. But maybe the process of having the conversation about why we put that there in the first place is going to be a good one. And maybe after many conversations we may need to change some of them, but I feel optimistic that we broadly got things on the right track.
I love what you said about the algorithms. I always get concerned how grassroots and smaller unsigned musicians really are missing out because they can't really tap into that, and it's really locking out musicians on a grassroots level.
The music industry is being run by growth marketers. Everything is around growth hacking principles that are mostly influenced by big tech. My background is as a technologist and tech leader over the last couple of decades, and so I've spent a lot of time living in that world in the commercial space and seeing how music tries to keep up with that kind of thing.
It's killing the art, honestly. I just don't think that it really promotes the right ideas around how we create connections between people. I could probably rant on a bit about this and I'm going to pull myself away from that ledge. But yeah, we feel really strongly that algorithmic media does change the dynamics of the work that's been created. At the very least, we should have diversity in the kinds of inputs that we have, so we can exist alongside algorithmic media — we can be doing our thing and hopefully bringing people value.
Joe, thank you so much for joining us today as a bit of a goodbye. You have picked a song. Do you want to tell us about what you've picked?
This is a track by a band called Charge Group, Sydney band. They were active in the early 2010s, maybe just a little bit before. They've been broken up for a while. But this track Broken Sunlight was stuck in my head at around the time that I was creating the SydneyMusic website. It's just a beautiful song, but there is a bridge that just simply and really plaintively says, “where's my community?”
Coming out of COVID, I really didn't know where my community was. We felt the detachment that had occurred over that last couple of years, and I knew that music was going to play an important role in bringing us back together. It gets us into rooms, it gets us … sitting around here talking, right? And so yeah, that “where’s my community?” refrain was just kind of sitting in my head. When I made SydneyMusic I immediately ran to a sticker printing place and just printed stickers with “where's my community?” and the URL on them — stuck them up all over Newtown, and that was the first thing that happened. So the song has been an important part of SydneyMusic's history.
Amazing. Thank you so much, Joe, and thank you so much for all the work that you're doing to keep Sydney music alive.
Appreciate it.
Joe Hardy, founder of SydneyMusic.net with an update on the beloved gig guide.
