(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.