SydneyMusic.net Turns 1

SydneyMusic was launched on March 1, 2022. And here we are, a year later!

We would not be here without you - yes, you! - along with everyone else that has used the site, provided us with feedback, told us about a gig they saw that they wouldn’t have known about otherwise, or connected us to more of the spectrum of Eora/Sydney’s diverse musical community.

Many people - from the moment the site was launched, and then beyond the relaunch we did in June of the same year - have told us that they’re delighted by the simplicity with which the site presents an overview of what’s happening.

Simplicity is the key: we hope it keeps the focus on elevating the art and the communities that it represents. It’s really a community discovery tool.

Music is rich ground for building connections with like-minded humans. The arts have always created a wonderful tapestry that documents and gives voice to the times and the communities within them, and live music - at its most elemental - is the sound of a community in realtime.

We hope the site helps you in discovering more of it.

Keeping it simple

Our desire for simplicity is aligned with wanting to avoid the attention economy, a term used to describe attracting, retaining and monetising attention. That means you can spend a lot less time on SydneyMusic to find out what's happening than you would on Instagram, for example - and that's due to the fundamental design philosophy of the two products respectively. Instagram sees more time spent on their platform as a win. We see less as a win.

Our method for doing that has been to adopt the design principles of the early World Wide Web, which we think has a lot to teach us. Web 1.0 has limits - many of them - but we think they’re useful constraints and they actually make the internet a far more interesting, vibrant, and explorable world with less noise and more signal. Our shorthand for all this is "hyperlinks, not algorithms".

If you deleted your social media, how would you find out about gigs? SydneyMusic hopes to be a service that makes the idea of logging off whatever social media service you rely on a little less scary.

Beyond SydneyMusic

There will be a point at which attempting to cover every aspect of Sydney's music community exhaustively on a single site becomes unwieldy, especially if it continues to to grow as we’d all like it to. But this problem can be addressed by again looking back to the original principles behind Web 1.0.

The key idea behind the early web was that of simple content containing hyperlinks. And in the early days, hyperlinks turned sites which would otherwise be isolated hosted content resources into a wonderful web (funny that) of interconnected information.

Do you feel like we don’t cover jazz well enough? Or microtonal modular synth music? Or house shows? Or raves? Did you know you can - literally in two minutes with a little technical knowledge - create your own version of this website by picking up the code, forking your own copy and deploying it? SydneyMusic.net’s code is open source and it’s available to anyone to use.

If you make your own version of SydneyMusic to cover a sub-community, or a different geographical region, we’ll link to it. And then the Web becomes a little bigger.

Whether today’s your first visit, or whether you’ve been here from the start: thank you for being a part of this website.

We’d love your feedback: send us an e-mail or join our Discord to be part of the conversation.

SydneyMusic is supported through donations and merch sales. You can help us keep running by visiting our store.