Joe.Blog

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.