Some thoughts on ABC's Four Corners story on Live Nation

The ABC’s Four Corners program did a story on the music industry and Live Nation last night. Huge respect to Avani Dias and the 4C team for making it so accessible and clear to a broad audience just how bad the situation has become in such a short time.

We also agree with Peter Garrett’s comments that this is part of a broader story about market capture and monopolies - and monopsonies.

Musicians aren’t the only category of workers that have been devastated by market consolidation, corporate deregulation, and anticompetitive practices - it applies to media, publishing, gaming, movies and so much more.

Live Nation is absolutely a serious consideration in this discussion: their market dominance makes it almost as much of a priority for regulatory action from the ACCC as Colesworths and Meta - but we also need to have a conversation about Big Tech.

There are many clearly demonstrable examples why companies like Spotify, Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Alphabet (Google, YouTube), Netflix, Apple and Amazon have deliberately used their market power to benefit themselves while being completely blind or uninterested in what the impact of their companies are on the total ecosystem.

The fact of the matter is, their behaviour has had a huge and devastating effect - and to ignore this is to be complicit. Blindly accepting these platforms in place of business models that fairly compensate artists is taking money away from them - there is no other way to look at this.

As Peter Garrett said: “a country without its own music is a country without a soul”. In a world where we’re struggling to be heard in a globalised, platform-centric universe, we are at risk of losing the very things that makes our culture worthwhile. We see Australian music losing its geographical idiosyncrasies as time goes on, which spells out a terrible future for our identifiable place on the world stage.

So where does SydneyMusic fit in with all of this?

SydneyMusic exists to re-centre our perspective on a truly local view of what’s happening in our ecosystem, without any influence from Big Tech or the more powerful forces in our industry.

There are 141 shows in the gig guide this week. So much of it is incredible - and it needs your support.

• SydneyMusic doesn’t need Instagram to function - we have a simple, super-fast website.

• SydneyMusic doesn’t rely on commercial consideration - so a corporate-owned venue with a fat marketing budget won’t get promoted with more enthusiasm over a DIY space.

• SydneyMusic doesn’t rely on predatory surveillance capitalism - look at our source code, we don’t use a single tracker or external script except for an anonymous analytics tool (that we pay for).

We ask for no revenue sharing. No insertion into the value chain. No promo fees. No advertising.

We do this because we care about the health of our scene. We want to see local music flourish. If it becomes unsustainable to be an artist starting out in Sydney today, in 10 years we won’t have local acts filling the Enmore, except for the ones that have found favour with the companies listed above. This is a problem.

While Live Nation has received millions of dollars in government funding according to the ABC, we have been at this stage told that we do not qualify for funding by any of the government bodies we’ve spoken to. We accept that funding determinations are made at their own discretion and according to their own strategy, but we can’t help but marvel at the imbalance of this.

SydneyMusic can not continue without support. We don’t have a revenue model - and it’s going to take a while for us to find one that we’re confident won’t negatively impact the guide: there’s a reason why every previous gig guide has gone out of business or is no longer effective like it once was, and we don’t want that to happen to us.

Can you work with us on helping Sydney to find a sustainable path?

• Become a Supporter on our Patreon

• Buy some merch or make a one-off donation on our Online Store

Joe Hardy & Caitlin Welsh

(Co-founders, SydneyMusic.net)

Further Reading

We strongly recommend reading “Chokepoint Capitalism” by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow to understand how the changes in our corporate world have had a tremendous impact on creatives.