Did you know that Laneway Festival's 2025 lineup had the smallest lineup ever, aside from the festival's first-ever Melbourne-only year, when it was held in an actual laneway?

And did you know that of that lineup, the festival's lineup contained only 30% Australian acts? A total of 6 artists were present at the Sydney leg, and all of them had finished playing by 3pm. Sydney artist DEVAURA (she's awesome btw) played at 11:30am!

Here are the last 5 years of lineups compared:

What the heck is going on?

While trying to figure this out, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Eva Sikes-Gerogiannis who put together a really cool package on the changing flavour of festivals in Australia on FBi Radio's Backchat program. Go take a listen!

With Eva's permission, I've transcribed the full interview. If you prefer audio, you can listen to the full thing on my Soundcloud.

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ESG: Joe Hardy, thank you for joining me. You wrote a great article about triple j's Hottest 100 representing the erosion of local culture. Could you just give us a rundown of what you mean by that and why you think interest in Australian music and culture seems to be sort of waning amongst young people?

JH: Yeah, the Hottest 100 this year was really interesting and pretty much immediately spawned a lot of interesting interpretations and analysis. Every year that the Hottest 100 rolls around, I get really interested in what it says about culture at the moment, because I kind of view the Hottest 100 as a bit of a litmus test on the population at large - it's less about Triple J listeners and more about people that are aware of the Hottest 100 as an institution, which I would say is a far greater number of people than actually listen to Triple J these days.

So, did some analysis on the [countdown]. People were already saying lowest number of Australian songs since 1996. The more I dug into it, I realised that actually the headline figure was the lowest number of Australian artists ever, which was 18. By comparison in 1996 the countdown had 24 artists. So a lower number of artists in the poll, the lowest ever - in 2014 I think they had 60 Australian songs. So we're talking a dramatic drop in the saturation of [local music].

But the more that I dug into it, the more that I was kind of going, "hang on a minute: I feel like I've been seeing these names around for a long time" [but kind of doubted myself because] maybe it's just the distortion of, you know, pandemic era and all those sorts of things. What even is time anymore? And then I realised that the average tenure of the bands that were represented in the Hottest 100 was actually over 10 years.

So these bands on average had been around for over 10 years, and there wasn't a single act in the Hottest 100 that had been around for less than 5. And so we're talking about pretty mature Australian acts. They're on, you know, mature album cycles, tours, those sorts of things. They've got good representation.

You see a high amount of major labels or at the very least music industry representation rather than the story that Triple J would like to tell, which is that they're pulling, you know, a lot of underground stuff and promoting it and making household names out of local talent.

So things have changed a lot. It's been a really big shift for the Hottest 100 and I just wanted to get some thoughts out to sort of go, what does this mean and why has it happened?

ESG: Yeah, right. So because Triple J is traditionally one of the radio stations and those sort of arbiters of culture that tend to champion Australian music more. So do you think maybe that effect, like you were saying, it's mostly established Australian acts who have more maybe financial backing and more like investment in them... do you think that the fact that Triple J as a cultural institution is championing them over smaller acts means that interest in smaller acts is eroding in general?

I think that the amount of firepower financially that is behind acts will dramatically change their chances of success, especially today. Look, it is a pay to play ecosystem, you know, as much as streaming can be a kingmaker and it can make careers out of people that go from nothing to having a viral track overnight.

The way that algorithmic platforms work is still financially incentivised, and it can be that you change your art to fit better with the platforms, or it can be that you throw spend behind the work. So major labels, for example, will be throwing lots of money towards Meta to promote artists, and they'll be throwing lots of money into all sorts of platforms to increase their online presence, which gives them a better chance of getting a good run.

So we are seeing a real change in the dynamics of how careers are made, and a really tragic part of this story is that Triple J have so dramatically lost their influence. And we see that in the differences between what Triple J's top 50 played artists were for last year as compared to the Hottest 100.

So, Sycco was the number two most played artist on Triple J last year, did not place in the hottest 100. The Buoys, local heroes, amazing, tour all the time, great album, 10th most played artists on Triple J last year. Did not place in the top 200. That's unheard of. Triple J always had a significant influence on the cultural ear. Richard Kingsmill was a kingmaker. People would really be afraid of whether he'd want to playlist an artist or not, and that could define a career for that cycle. So it's a really interesting change that's gone on. And I think we're dealing with the effects of that in real time.

Triple J is obviously only one point of influence amongst many, but they're all sort of having this conversation in question at the moment.

ESG: Yeah. That's a really interesting perspective because I feel like there's these conversations about maybe the Americanisation of culture or that sort of thing is a real tendency to sort of like wag the fingers at young people and say, "Oh, you don't know what's good for you. You're not supporting Australian music." So do you think, do you agree with that at all? That it is a cultural shift amongst young people, or is it most obviously they're quite interconnected, but do you think that maybe the financial side of it is more influential?

JH: I'm fortunate to have a background working in tech, so a lot of my time has been thinking about how to scale systems for potentially unlimited amounts of growth, which works very neatly in line with how companies think, where more and more and more they want to be able to scale their organisations to for unlimited growth, global growth. Unlimited scale is such a strange concept because of course there's limits to scale, but nonetheless, I digress.

So studying those sorts of dynamics, the thing with distribution in the online sphere is that now everyone, like if we look at musicians, for example, everyone is now distributing their content globally.

So the second you enter the game as a sub 1000 stream artist, you're in a playing field where you're really hoping that your game of chance with the algorithm is going to get your stuff distributed to globally is because that's the only way you can actually make a viable career is if you have your millions of streams and begin to get the flywheel working like that.

That's how it works now. We're all attempting to globally distribute our content and there are less and less threads that actually tell stories about local scenes, giving them an identity and helping them to hang together and have commonalities with other bands and all of those things.

Local bands are less and less and less looking at their peers that are immediately around them and playing shows with them, they're looking at the competition over in LA or over in Europe or those sorts of things. So we have a globalisation of the sounds that are being created and less and less that you can go, That sounds like it was made in Sydney or that sounds like it was made in Melbourne or that sounds like it was made in LA. Those have always been really strong sonic signatures that have then been exported and influenced people all over the world. But you still have those local centres of geography.

ESG: Absolutely. Yeah. So on that note, there's been, I'm sort of like tentatively calling it the "Coachellafication of Laneway". So why do you think that culture and those conversations surrounding Laneway seem to be veering towards more of that like Coachellified Americanized model or is it? Do you think that's specifically a Laneway thing or is it sort of translating to Aussie festival culture in general?

JH: Yeah, there are a number of contributing factors, but yes, I think ultimately this is a pretty universal trend. And I think I should say as well in amongst all of this, I genuinely think the music industry is really terrified right now. They are in this sort of perilous life and death situation where they're trying to hang on to audiences and give the people what they want so that they can remain in the game.

It is really that stark, and, you know, looking at cancellations like Splendour in the Grass, Groovin the Moo, Spilt Milk, you know, so on and so forth: it's a real threat. Why are they becoming more and more Americanized? Well, it's where the audiences are listening. You know, in the same way that the Hottest 100 told a story that people were listening to TikTok - you know, it really does look like a streaming chart.

You know, it looks like a Spotify most played artists chart that is now playing in two lineups. And I've heard industry panels from the music industry where people say they just trawl Reddit and see, you know, what is getting the most noise to figure out what their next booking should be. More and more, the music industry is just looking at dashboards, you know: plays, dollars, tickets sold, they're looking at global trends and they're - with the globalisation of all of these trends - they're just hoping that they'll translate into the local market.

I think that's a disaster because we used to have conviction- and tastemaker-led decisions being made, the bookers of the Big Day Out, the original Laneway Festival, you know, all of these things had this sense of taking a gamble on, you know, stuff that they thought was really cool and a degree of trust went with the curator of that of that event, whatever was happening, and people would go along for the ride.

The Big Day Out built its career on these incredible stories of, you know, bands like Nirvana playing the Hordern Pavilion. You know, 5,000 people and no one knew who they were. We're in a very different landscape now. The artists need to be known quantities and they need to have the runs on the board, and it's mostly shown through streaming that shows that there'll be an audience there. But in turn, it means that the ears of the audiences are less and less open minded as well. So at festivals, you're seeing people just kind of flocking to the artist or artists that they came there for. It's not a discovery situation. You know, they've checked off what they want to see.

There are really different dynamics in festivals now compared to, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. And I think it's really interesting to go, what are the causes of that? And, you know, what is derived from social media? What is a change in the way that conversations about culture happen locally, and how do we, you know, maybe make people open minded to new sounds and new artists all over again?

ESG: Yeah, absolutely. Actually on that point of what you were saying about booking who you know is going to bring in an audience: there's the Charli XCX of it all, obviously, coming off the Brat Summer and everything. It's sort of a big draw for a lot of people going to Laneway this year, the most cynical part of myself is sort of thinking that's why Laneway wasn't another festival that was cancelled this year.

JH: Oh, and I will say when the lineup dropped, I went: "you did it. You got this one right."

You know, I think I really saw a sense of resistance in the recent Splendour lineups. I think they really wanted to keep some of the old vibes. They wanted to hang on to that curatorial thing, even though they went for some really big gambles like Kylie Minogue and those sorts of [acts]. The audiences weren't having it because it wasn't in their lane.

Whereas I think to do something like Charli XCX, you know, is a real zeitgeisty kind of thing. Sometimes Laneway have even been ahead of the curve and then the festival has happened right as it's peaking. It must be incredibly exciting for them to sort of pull off something like that. But for Charli, we're obviously on the other side of the peak of that zeitgeist.

But still, it's got enough holding power that, you know, everyone's been watching the tour happening all over the world. And they want their little moment of it. You know, they want to film the Apple dance and upload it to TikTok and all of that kind of thing. Whatever. But yeah, I think Charli was the master stroke and they probably did that through deep relationships with Charli's team and all that kind of thing.

But generally, I think they just went "we've got to go for broke on, you know, nailing the zeitgeist. Otherwise we might not be around next year." And I think they made a smart business decision - but I think the lineup is a tragedy for Australian underground talent and also for turning people onto new stuff, which is what Laneway used to excel in.

Laneway was a little bit like, it felt like an offshoot of Pitchfork back in the day, but it's still had a lot of stuff that it was pulling out of the ecosystem all over the world. But it did give a good spotlight on Australian music as well.

ESG: Yeah, absolutely. I went to Laneway in 2019 and even as recently as then it felt much more local and it felt a lot more like it was about going and seeing what you could find. And the headliners were, I think the headliners were Gang Of Youths that year and there was just more Australian artists in general. So it's really been a rapid, rapid shift.

JH: The pandemic contributed hugely to that. The fact that we were mainlining algorithmic feeds for two whole years inside bored out of our faces I think really just allowed the algorithms to really do their work in becoming the dominant and preeminent way that we consume content. And by the way, that's how these companies refer to music and culture: they call it "content".

More and more, you're just seeing these relatively cynical decisions being made [based on] "performance": in a very top line metrics kind of way. It's not about depth of engagement. It's not what the artist is trying to say. It's not what they actually want to tell a story about their culture, so much.

So much music that performs well on social media is still great music. I'm not shitcanning it on its own terms, but the first principles that inform what is making music perform no longer has those things maybe as being more important than the performance of that stuff. And I think that's important.

There are a few things around the philosophy of how music companies are working these days, though, that I think really need to be explored some more. And one of the things that we don't have a huge amount of transparency on is company ownership: a lot of music companies are being bought by international companies.

For example, Laneway itself is owned by TEG, which was a merger between TEG Dainty and Ticketek. And TEG itself is owned by Silver Lake, which is a private equity company headquartered out of the States. I was looking at their mission statement. I think it's helpful to read these sorts of things to understand the way that money decisions are being made for a line item like Laneway, which is many, many layers down the rung, you know, it's buried [within] a bunch of fully owned and partially owned companies. Here's their mission statement:

"Silver Lake partners and aligns with exceptional management teams to invest in, build, and grow great companies. With a portfolio comprising more than 1 trillion in enterprise value that lives and breathes technology to generate compelling annual revenue growth, the depth, breadth, and momentum of Silver Lake's network is unmatched."

ESG: It's a bit tragic, isn't it?

JH: Live Nation, as much as it's an entertainment company, [is not much different]. It's got a majority stake in Splendour in the Grass, right? And then on LinkedIn you started seeing people's job titles changing from, you know, "I've got this role at Secret Sounds" to "my role's at Live Nation". [Then] restructures, redundancies, and you know, this is just a P&L sheet exercise for these companies.

The music industry out in Australia, as long as it's delivering the returns and the margins, [overseas owners] don't really care what is being fed or nurtured inside the scene itself. There are people that work for these companies that do, of course - and I know that every day there are a lot of people that are feeling like their efforts to amplify the culture they care about are being thwarted by the companies they work for. And so I don't blame them as individuals, but the companies themselves, absolutely, especially the foreignly-owned ones really need to consider "what's our social responsibility?" from a cultural point of view - "what are we trying to incubate?"

They do try. You see, you know, emerging talent programs... I saw one that Live Nation was doing the other day and I'm like, look, I know that you can pay lip service to these things, but the best thing you can do is to allow a scene thrive on its own terms, rather than it being done through [commercial] arbiters. Now our arbiters are social media feeds and streaming platforms and they're making the decisions about who gets up and who doesn't.

ESG: Yeah, absolutely. That's actually a perfect segue because I was, what we were saying before about TikTok and this new culture of the "fit check" sort of like form that happens on social media in general. I think with Laneway more than any other Australian festival and any other year of Laneway, I've seen a lot of fit checks saying, "what are we wearing to Laneway? what's acceptable to wear to Laneway? Rate my Laneway fit." and a lot of comments like absolutely shitting on like people's outfits. If you're a man and you're planning on wearing jorts and a button down shirt, your life is not worth living. Like truly, it's like that serious. And I've just never seen that before. I think I've seen it for Coachella and like even, you know, other American festivals, but never really in Australia. So why do you think it's happening now? And for Laneway?

JH: Trends are spreading faster than ever. Part of it is a bit of a spectator/imitation kind of thing where people watch all of this activity happening overseas and they want to emulate that because it makes them feel like they're a part of something.

This has always happened: people have always emulated, you know, different cultural signals - it used to be, you know, magazines back in the day, television was more influential, media in all its various forms has had a big play in people's self evaluation of themselves and how they perform, you know, within their culture, but social media absolutely is making it more and more and more of a monoculture than it's ever been before.

And so you're seeing these trends of fit checks and the format of these fit checks rippling their way across from other countries as if it's always been done that way, overnight. And yeah, I agree - the difference in how people follow along with that rather than us building our own sort of... there are any number of ways that you could imagine an Australian thinking about going to a festival. We have so many uniquely Australian things. Why aren't we celebrating that? Why aren't we being Aussies in the context of that kind of thing, in whatever form that happens in our multicultural environment, in all of the ways that, you know, Australia has very unique aspects of the way that its society is, is pulled together.

ESG: It's interesting as well... I've seen in these fit checks, like what you were saying, it's about imitating that... "playing a spectator" sort of thing. A lot of people are saying they're dressing to see Charli XCX or they're dressing to see Clairo. So for example, if you're dressing Charli XCX, obviously it's like the more brat style or if they're dressing to see Clairo, maybe they're wearing like, I don't know, like a flowing little dress. Like it's very much what you were speaking to before, which is that people are going not to discover, but to just like see that act already.

JH: I find there's a bit of a sports team kind of energy in festivals these days. People have got the primary team they're backing, and so they're going for that. They might have a couple of other teams that they're keeping an eye on, but stan culture is pretty ferocious these days, you know, the sort of captivation that people have with a specific thing at the expense of all other things is really huge. So yeah, Charli dwarfs them all, you know, this time around, but you know, we've seen it with things like the fred again.. tour, the amount of hysteria that was around that which, you know, bully for him! It's great that he can, you know, be a working artist that plays arena shows with a week's notice. But you know, a lot of that is stoked up through social media as well.

ESG: That's all the questions I have. Do you have anything else that you wanted to touch on or discuss?

JH: I think while all of this is happening and we're watching a lot of money get made in the music industry, we need to remember that the music industry that's hurting, you know, that we're seeing cancellations for Splendour in the Grass and the like: that's a lagging indicator of a problem that's been going for a lot longer.

You know the underground - I don't need to tell a lot of listeners of FBi this because I know they care and love the underground very deeply - but it's been hurting for so much longer. And we are now seeing that difficulty turn into real pain for underground artists as they question whether they will ever have a career or whether it will even just be viable.

I don't think a lot of musicians [expect] to quit their full time jobs. They're not feeling entitled to that, but we need to feed the underground. We need our sights to be on where the uniquely Australian voices are coming from that actually gives us a sonic identity.

I don't want to sound like every other band... when an Australian band goes and plays a showcase over in LA, I want them to have something that people are thinking, "What's going on in their neck of the woods? Who are the other bands that they play with?" I don't want a bunch of anonymous people that sound like their peers on streaming or social media. I just want a progressive evolving sonic identity that's in there.

But the good news is that the art is so freaking good in Australia still. I've been active in the scene for 20 years I've never been so excited by the music that's being created by the underground right now, and independent of its performance, and its placement in the Hottest 100, and how the industry quote unquote is doing the community continues to work hard and put out the best work, and...

Look, just get out to shows. Go see a space that you've never seen before, see a band that you've never seen before, buy their merch, tell your friends about it, write lists of your favourite Australian music, the scene needs it more than it's ever needed it and I think it's a matter of the consumer's responsibility to go, "no, I'm going to eschew some of these trends that I've become aligned with [by] just going with trending culture, and I'm actually going to go and define my own I'm circle of excitement, you know, what I'm actually connecting with and those sorts of things".

Thank you so much.

Did you listen to or see the triple j Hottest 100 countdown? Did something feel off? Maybe you couldn't put your finger on it. Maybe you just weren't excited by the tracks. And then you think: "maybe it's me?"

Or maybe not. The numbers tell a different story, and while I haven't yet had time to properly dive in and run a more comprehensive breakdown - here's a start I've made, with some commentary. Take it for what it's worth.

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Let's get the obvious bit out of the way - this year's Hottest 100 is a terrible showing for Australian music. Here's a comparison of a few years of the poll results to illustrate:

Only 18 Australian artists made the countdown this year, and that's the lowest we've ever seen in the end-of-year poll. Pretty cooked for a station whose main charter is to promote Australian culture! Unfortunately, it gets worse.

While I was trying to understand what was going on with 2024, I started making a note of when the countdown's Australian artists first became active (usually the year of their first recording). It looked like this:

Here's where things get really messed up: the average distance of time from the poll to the artists' first release was 10.39 years. So, the 18 acts that were lucky enough to chart in the Hottest 100 have been recording and releasing music for an average of more than 10 years.

Doesn't feel very "youth" or contemporary to me, but what do I know?

Let's look at some historical trends:

That's insane.

Some notes:

• The average number of years since the artists' first release in 1996 was 5.25 years - but that includes AC/DC and Midnight Oil, both acts that started releasing music 20 years earlier! This negates any arguments about Missy Higgins being an outlier in the 2024 poll.

• In 2014, in amongst a huge year of 60 tracks from 38 Australian artists, a whopping 6 artists released their first-ever track in the previous year - brand new acts getting a placement in the Hottest 100.

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A few thoughts

• Let's just get something out of the way: as a cultural influence, triple j doesn't matter anymore. It hasn't mattered for years. It's not a matter of opinion: their ratings have been in freefall for years, with the last few years recording some of the worst ratings ever seen for any contemporary music station in Australia. I encourage you to browse the last year worth of surveys to take in just how fucked the station is - it's well and truly on the bottom of the ladder, and it used to be a credible force on all Metro surveys (to varying degrees). When HIT 104.1 (2DAY FM) is kicking your arse in the Sydney market, you know it's a bad time.

• The Hottest 100 isn't really a commentary on triple j's programming or even the station's own listeners, and it hasn't been for quite some time. The station began losing audience to radio stations like Nova in the 2010s, and that was shown in the poll's results, which frequently saw excellent showings for tracks that weren't era-defining hits on the station but played well in commercial media and on the ARIA charts. I don't have playlist data going back this far, but (for example) tracks like Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" and Tones & I's "Dance Monkey" both jump out as being anomalies for the station's audience at that time. (Always happy to be proven wrong on this.)

• Despite that, interest in the Hottest 100 as a cultural event increased significantly over the years, even while triple j's audience was being eroded. With the previous point in mind, the poll's results were always going to be significantly influenced by people outside of triple j's listener demographic.

• In conclusion: all we can take from the Hottest 100 is information about the people that voted in the Hottest 100. So this is about the voting population - self-professing music fans - and where they're at.

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So what does it all mean?

2024's Hottest 100 result tells us that Australian music is no longer significant in our cultural conversations

A huge aspect about what defines modern culture is shared moments - the ones that find a significant audience and create a moment, one that's shared and creates a cultural touchstone for that point in time, for what was happening in that time.

Our big shared cultural moments are now defined through social media - the "Apple" dance! the "Hot To Go" dance! Saltburn becoming a TikTok phenomenon! - and reinforced through streaming. This has created a dramatic shift in listeners' tastes.

Australian artists are - more than ever - competing against a global pool of "content", and if we're going to play a numbers game like that, Australian music is going to lose. We're seeing that every day through reduced engagement with Australian music.

It's the ecosystem, stupid

This whole problem is bigger than triple j. The 2024 Hottest 100 result scares the shit out of me, but the problems don't begin or end with triple j's programming or the station itself. At the end of the day, they're just collateral as part of a major cultural shift - and the effects have been far more wide-reaching.

All of our local music media has been eroded or destroyed. Street press provided critical infrastructure to talk about local acts and give them an identity. Online blogs and culture publications gave amplification to niches. We had more music on TV, which people actually watched once upon a time. And there was arts journalism in major mastheads.

Live music as a total industry in 2025 is big, but local live music is a shadow of what it was 20 years ago, in terms of volume and turnouts - this is being obscured in the industry-wide numbers by big international tours, which keep breaking records. None of this is making a comment about quality - underground art is as phenomenal as it's ever been, as I say over and over again - but in terms of what's being fed, nurtured, and given airtime - it isn't finding its way to people like it used to.

So what caused all this?

Online platforms killed triple j and the rest of media, and now everyone's hooked up to the same feed

triple j's a sad story of yet another media entity being cannibalised by tech platforms and spat out. I've watched it happen over and over again - for my sins - while I worked for many of Australia's larger media companies, where I got front row seats to watch their influence and capital get eroded by tech.

I don't think Big Tech has always wished for the death of media, but they definitely didn't care what happened to media as long as their own platforms ultimately came out on top. Their tactics were underhanded: for example, Facebook lied about the performance of short-form video - and my team was in charge of delivering a media company's adoption of video thanks to this exact farce - and, like with nearly every company that followed the same path, dozens of journalists lost their jobs, a lot of money was wasted, and media lost valuable time that should have been spent competing with social media rather than making it their most important audience driver.

In the 2010s, media companies were generally too agog and far too comfortable to respond to the changes and curveballs that were being thrown at it, or even necessarily aware that Big Tech wasn't their friend and might actually try to eat their lunch. Media companies were stable, multi-decade businesses, and tech disrupted the whole game in the space of a few years. That was an industry that never got on top of the shifting sands - plus this new wave of Silicon Valley culture was exciting, intoxicating, and we were all addicted to their platforms ourselves.

triple j lost audience because platforms and record labels found a far more efficient way to define culture - through algorithms. People now consume music more and more through what's pushed to them through feeds. Whether that's a TikTok FYP, a Spotify playlist, your Instagram feed, it's more likely that your attention is going to be with those sources rather than anything else - a centrally brokered feed.

The thing is, record companies don't care where you're getting your music from as long as they have a solid share of the revenue. And if they can invest in 5 blockbuster international artists rather than a complex, changing local ecosystem - they can, and will, and do. Yes, A&R for local artists still exists, but don't kid yourself. The labels go where the money is - and we've just seen a sickening blow get dealt to investment in local artists if this trend holds.

This is urgent

How do we make it so that local art is a valued part of popular culture? It's a problem that everyone needs to take an interest in, and if we don't answer the question, this trend won't stop here. This is a serious problem that listeners and facilitators need to wrestle with.

I don't think we can look at streaming and social media as a necessary evil any more - I genuinely believe they are corrosive devices that are watering down community engagement and culture at every turn. The forces that makes stuff play well on an economy of views, clicks and streams is one that favours some types of culture over others. It doesn't make the stuff that does well bad, but it does raise the question of what you're missing - Australian music, for example.

I've been thinking about these problems for a long time - it's why I created SydneyMusic.net: to provide a completely missing truly local view of what's happening in my city without the information being obscured by a game of chance with an algorithm.

If we don't start having serious, engaged, rational conversations about the effects of this outsourcing of cultural facilitation, so much that we love about what makes Australian music great could disappear - just like Australian media did.

Addendums

29/1: This had 1,900 views at the time of writing and received a lot of thoughtful and overwhelmingly positive feedback. Thanks to everyone that shared it around and added their thoughts.

Couple of interesting bits and pieces:

• Cheers to Dom who helpfully pointed out that the Top 50 Most Played Artists list was posted in December. The differences are quite staggering when you look at them - triple j crowned their second most played artist Sycco the J Award Album Of The Year. Even those factors combined couldn't muster a Top 100 placement. There are a lot of Aussies on that list.

• TikTok user BandBanta made a TikTok that discussed the relationship between the Hottest 100 and social media with that sounded like it made similar conclusions to this piece, which promptly got removed from the platform for "violation of Community Guidelines". Glitch in the matrix? Heavy-handed content policing? Super weird.

In terms of responses to this piece, I had a few people say they felt the Hottest 100 result was reflective of the quality of Australian music right now. That couldn't be further from the truth.

Some suggestions if you're looking for good Aussie stuff - I'm just going to share what I know well.

• Go down to your local independent record store and ask them what good stuff is coming out of your neighbourhood. If they don't know, go to another until you find one that does.

• Tune in to the Wettest 100 which is a wonderful survey of the weird and the wonderful from across Australia.

• Here's a list of the SydneyMusic.net team's favourite tracks from 2024 - all Sydney

• You can listen to our Cupholder Industries playlist which is mostly Australian stuff

• David James Young (who also is a Gig Researcher for SydneyMusic) listens to a lot of music and writes a big Top 100 every year - heaps of Aussie stuff. Keep an eye on his Instagram. He's already published an awesome list of the top 50 shows he went to (out of 305)

• Most importantly: find and go to a DIY show. That's where you'll find artists doing their art on their own terms. It's a vital and thriving scene, and musicians are discovering it enables greater creative autonomy and opportunities to grow and develop in a supportive community. More and more artists are playing house shows and building scenes with their friends.

• But go and see Australian music, and turn up for the supports. Sydney has four gig guides: Best Bands You Never Heard, The Underground Stage, emus.space and SydneyMusic.net. There are guides for lots of different parts of Australia - Wollongong, Newcastle, Central Coast, Melbourne, Brisbane - I'm sure many others as well. Heaps of cool scenes out there.

Think that's probably enough on this topic, the discourse appears to have settled down and we can all get on with listening to some great music and supporting artists. Cheers!

I'm an AI skeptic, but you can't be against something you don't know or understand.

To that end, Simon Willison's summary of LLM progress over the year of 2024 is incredibly useful. In-depth, well-balanced observations from the evolution of a fast-paced (but still grifter-packed) industry.

I still think that the that-which-is-called-AI industry is on track for a rude and bumpy shock as they realise maybe a Moore's Law-style rate of improvement isn't actually what we're looking at here. Ed Zitron agrees. (less is more Ed, hire an editor)

If that's the case, look forward to a hell of an economic correction: NVIDIA and a bunch of tech stocks are propping up the S&P500. I don't think we talk enough about just how much of a problem this is, but time will tell.

Big Tech companies are terrible custodians of our cultural artefacts. They exist to collect revenue and attention: they have no interest in the preservation of culture or how their systems might influence or replace existing social fabric. Even worse - what happens when breaking changes are introduced and years and decades of "content" are affected.

Recently my 14-year-old and I were horrified to discover that at some point in late 2023, Final Space got deleted from the internet. While we were separated by the pandemic, we watched every episode of this show together. Our group chat was called "The Chookity-Pok Alliance". This was an important part of our memories. But then Warner Bros. needed to find some tax write-offs, and completely deleted everything to do with the property. There's no opportunity for us to enjoy these memories - it's just gone.

The internet now functions on what is known as "recurring revenue" - it's why everything is a subscription instead of a product that you purchase once. Remember how you could buy a copy of a version of Photoshop and use it forever? Adobe hate that - so they've aggressively moved the business to licensing their software as part of their Cloud subscriptions.

Recurring revenue means that once you've secured a reliable base of users, all you need to do is tweak your unit economics. You can lower your costs - putting downward pressure on your suppliers or "finding efficiencies" (e.g. firing people) - or put your prices up. Tech companies regularly do both - that's why your Spotify or Netflix subscription keeps getting more expensive, and why the service doesn't seem to really change all that much.

If tech companies have a reliable base secured, they'll also do everything they can to water down or erode value for users to make their costs go further - or prioritise opportunities for generating more revenue, even if it works against the user's best interests. Cory Doctorow calls this "enshittification".

Culture (or "content", as Big Tech companies would rather call it) is annoyingly expensive, and it's a black mark on the P&L of any business. So it's not surprising that Spotify is trying to increase the percentage of subscription revenue that they get to keep as profit. See Liz Pelly's astounding deep dive on how Spotify is happy to commission and ingest music that doesn't require them to pay out a per-stream royalty to artists. They're basically commissioning muzak: anodyne recordings designed to represent the most inoffensive reflection of a genre or mood. This after Spotify deigned to tighten their rules around stream payouts - including not paying artists for tracks with less than 1,000 streams.

In the last 10 years, subscriptions have replaced the lion share of your spend on media. Effectively that makes you a renter - you have access to all of the riches of a platform, as long as you keep forking out for the monthly spend. When Netflix was the only game in town, it was amazing: all of this content, for only $15.99? Now we have around 10 platforms, all duking it out over who gets a share of which content libraries. You no longer get the benefit you once had of everything (or a lot of it) on one platform with one subscription.

In order for the platforms to protect their profit, they keep optimising. For the benefit of you, the consumer? Of course not. For the benefit of the creators that they got you start paying for their platform? Dream on. That's why every platform is introducing ads - even for paying subscribers.

In a world where it's likely that you might be paying for 3-5 video streaming platforms (conservatively) and at least a couple of music subscription services... at what point have we reached a tipping point where you're better off paying for media once and then owning it forever?

Especially when your purchasing decisions are far more likely to fairly reward the artists.

Especially when the platform or rightsholder could choose to delete anything you love at any moment.

Buy your music. Buy the video content you want to hang onto. Don't rent culture. We need it to last longer than the platforms do.

* * *

Further reading:

• Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Gilney

• The Rot Economy by Ed Zitron (bless him, right ideas but he needs an editor)

• The internet is starting to break: here's why by YouTuber Mrwhosetheboss

• Proof of Spotify marking AI musicians as verified artists by YouTuber Benn Jordan

Founding member of America (the band) sits in at The Eveleigh with Roy Valentine, Matt Haviland and James Valentine early on a Thursday evening.