Some reflections at the end of 2025

The year is almost done, and the SydneyMusic team are taking a couple of weeks off the tools. Our Instagram Stories and weekly emails will be on hiatus until the 5th of January, and we’ll be back on ABC Radio Sydney for our weekly Saturday Breakfast segment on the 17th of January. The gig guide remains online at sydneymusic.net.

Welcome to our first end-of-year letter. It feels like a good time to give an update on SydneyMusic and where our little organisation is at. Up til now our updates have been pretty ad hoc, aside from an annual birthday post (3, 2, 1). From this point, we intend to put out a formal update like this one on a quarterly basis.

If you’d rather hear about some tunes, keep an eye out across January: we’ll be sharing 2025 wrap-ups from SydneyMusic staff and guest contributors. There’s a lot of incredible music to talk about and we can’t wait to dive in.

For now, on with the news ...

Somehow, we’re still here (and the gig guide is funded for another 6 months!)

TL;DR: Our community is amazing. Thanks to the support we’ve received we are looking forward to coming back in 2026 with a bang.

We really thought it was over back in June. When we announced we were closing down, we were about 6 months into the red in terms of our energy reserves and our financial options. If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from this project across more than three and a half years of operation, it’s that running a good gig guide is really fucking time consuming.

In the last 6 months we've experienced a groundswell that has resulted in us being able to finally announce that, as of a few weeks ago, our baseline budget is now fully funded until the 30th of June, 2026. This is the first time in the organisation’s history that our “minimum viable budget” has been covered: a huge breakthrough.

We would like to extend our greatest appreciation and thanks to:

• Our incredible individual supporters. There are currently 337 monthly SydneyMusic Supporters, up from 139 at the start of this year. Together these amazing regular supporters contribute around 24.5% of our minimum monthly budget each month. Every donation — ranging from $2 to $200 a month — combined makes a huge difference. We want this resource to be free for everyone, forever — your donations are making that possible. Support us here.

• Heaps Normal. Thank you for enabling us to restart operations with your generous one-off donation. This is an organisation helmed by great people who are super thoughtful contributors to their community.

• RØDE Microphones. Covering 20% of our minimum budget for 2 years is beyond generous and enabled us to think long-term. We’re really proud to have this Sydney success story in our corner, and we’re really grateful to RØDE for their commitment to going the distance with us.

• The Neilson Foundation. We wouldn’t have made it through these last two years without Paris and Beau Neilson’s belief in us. We’re over the moon that they’ve stepped back up to support us in 2026.

• Neon Legal, who have got behind SydneyMusic and provided us with low bono legal support, including helping us to secure Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status from the Australian Taxation Office.

• And finally, a thank you to The Commons, who as of this month have donated a year’s membership to their Chippendale coworking space — meaning the SydneyMusic team finally has an IRL space for us to work and meet.

To date, we have not succeeded in obtaining any financial support from the music industry or government funding bodies (we’d love to change that! if you reckon you can help, get in touch).

What does having our “minimum viable budget” covered mean? It means that we can now guarantee that all 50 hours per week of core gig guide maintenance, operations and admin are funded, ensuring that we can run our guide in a consistent and reliable manner.

Our audience is growing — despite “AI”

TL;DR: AI stopped us growing for the first 6 months of the year, but we’ve come roaring back, finishing with average monthly traffic increased year-on-year by +46%

There has been plenty of discourse and deeply concerning evidence showing how so-called “Artificial Intelligence” is negatively affecting news and media consumption. The past few decades of ongoing disruption from technology and changing business mentalities have impacted media organisations of all levels — local news, interest groups, and larger commercial media operators. Music street press was an early casualty of this.

2025 was the year that AI went from being a hot discussion topic to actually having some serious impact. The evidence was everywhere: ChatGPT’s usage this year increased by 180% compared to this time last year, although that growth is slowing. Users seem to be making use of LLM chatbots in place of search engines. In music itself, we’re watching with concern as the Big 3 major labels make deals with AI companies like Klay Vision, Suno and Udio.

The impact of these most recent developments to online news and information publishers has been devastating. In music, US-based music site Stereogum recently had to introduce a drastically new business model thanks to Google introducing “AI Overviews”, which immediately had a fatal effect on traffic, lowering ad impressions and thus revenue. We experienced a similar traffic decline ourselves (it’s a good thing we don’t run ads!).

From March through to July this year, our traffic started to decrease for the first time in our history, after years of continuous growth. Meanwhile, there was a small but noticeable increase of people being sent to SydneyMusic.net by tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity — suggesting that there were a lot of people asking their favourite LLM “what gigs are on?”

Many of those chatbot users never actually look into where that information comes from (and as we reported in an exclusive for our mailing list subscribers, it was frequently wrong as well).

Somehow, that’s turned around: our website traffic has been growing steadily through the back half of this year. November 2025 was our biggest month ever with an audience of 25,100 unique browsers, a 46% increase compared with November 2024! And we still don't do any promotion or marketing. Which brings us to ...

Our mission is to get more people out to shows, which means we need to reach them.

TL;DR: Our audience keeps growing, which is remarkable given the core product hasn’t changed in 3.5 years. Our “minimum viable budget” covers core gig guide maintenance; we also want to invest in helping more people discover local live music.

Grassroots live music is suffering from a demand problem that isn’t being seen by premium-tier events - for evidence of this, see Live Nation reporting a 24% increase in operating income / EBITDA last quarter. Premium-tier events are saturating the available demand for live music with high-cost, high-scale events. Grassroots live music isn’t getting a look in: next to the overwhelming marketing power of these huge operators combined with streaming’s diminishing effects on visibility for underground music, independent artists and organisers are struggling to reach new audiences.

We believe that the grassroots offers a compelling alternative to severely overpriced shows while protecting and supporting our local music ecosystem. We want to see music fans of all ages embracing local live music, where tickets are reasonably priced and support our local creatives and businesses rather than funneling profits into foreignly-owned companies that are focused on sure bets and scale.

SydneyMusic already helps to fill a gap by making shows discoverable, but there are limitations to our gig guide: what if you have zero familiarity with any of the artists? What can help you discover your next favourite act? And how do you create context and provide depth to something that might read to some as just a massive list of bands and artists?

We want to make live music more accessible to people that aren’t already familiar with it, which means figuring out how to make our gig guide easier to explore. Our “minimum viable budget” covers core operations: 50 hours a week. To reach more people, we need to be able to invest in finding new ways to do  that.

We’re pretty blown away that we’ve been able to continue growing our audience using the same website that launched all the way back in June 2022 — but we reckon it’s time we tried some new things, too.

In closing

It’s been a gruelling, difficult year. If anyone wants to consider starting a not-for-profit music organisation based on our journey, I would strongly recommend pausing for a moment before you jump. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and there is a lot of sacrifice behind these stories of breakthrough — and there will be more challenges ahead yet: being a not-for-profit does not make the road easier or more viable (quite the opposite), but I remain convinced that it was the right thing to do.

The rewards, though, have been non-financial: it’s in the stories we hear from people literally every week telling us how live music reconnected them with their local community in a time of loneliness and isolation. It’s in the excitement we get when we spot another t-shirt at a show. And it’s hearing stories like SydneyMusic’s open-source codebase being cloned for use in two cities in Vietnam. We know we’ve made a huge difference, and we are hopeful that we can continue to make a difference in the years to come.

Thank you for reading, we appreciate you being here. Please consider becoming a monthly Supporter if you want to see this resource get even more people plugged into our amazing musical community.

Love,

Joe Hardy
Director & Co-founder
SydneyMusic.net