"Australians don't want to hear new Australian music anymore" is a statement of fact, as far as streaming stats and radio plays go, but it's not the full story.
Australia's live scene isn't totally dead yet, and new Australian bands and artists are still building their local audiences and breaking through internationally, mostly via YouTube and Spotify playlists.
But meanwhile, the biggest radio stations remain in Retro Mode, clocking up more plays for 40 year old songs from INXS, Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil than any new Australian music released in the past few years.
Why?
Primarily because they're all trying to play it safe now and most of their audience is 50-90 year olds, and they mostly only want to be reminded of the songs that were important to them, when they were young.
Just wanted to make that clear up front.
From The Music:
"For the second year in a row, an Australian single failed to top the ARIA charts.
Indeed, just one homegrown hit reached the Top 10 – Dom Dolla’s Saving Up spent a solitary week at number 10 in February.
ARIA’s Top 100 for 2024 features five Australian singles, led by Vance Joy’s Riptide at number 24. It spent an impressive 39 weeks in the Top 40. The only problem is … it was released in 2013."
Full Story From The Music Is Here
But Australians, as always, are still listening to an enormous amount of music, generally, and still buying new CDS and vinyl:
The Australian recorded music industry posted its sixth consecutive year of growth in 2024, with wholesale sales rising 6.1% to $717 million.
New data released today by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) shows the industry growth was fuelled by both physical and digital sales, with total digital sales outpacing physical at 6.5% compared to 2.1%. The digital market now represents $656 million, or 91.5% of the total market.
Subscription services continue to be the dominant force at play, increasing their market share by another two percentage points to represent 71.0% of Australia’s total music market, or $509 million, a figure 8.9% larger than 2023. Ad supported streaming models slowed dramatically however, from a 15.3% jump in revenue in 2023 to just 1.9% growth in 2024.
And yet, for all the huge audiences and numbers here, Australian music is not topping our own charts regularly anymore, and international artists get the majority of attention from young Australian music lovers.
We had it good, so very good it turns out, in the 1970s-1990s.
The once reliable live music circuit of 1000s of pubs, clubs and other gigs that stretched all across Australia is mostly gone now. Radio stations like JJJ and MMMFM that once played new singles by The Baby Animals or Spiderbait 30 or times a week, now try to "break" new Australians acts with maybe 10 plays a week, or 20 if they're really lucky. That doesn't work. The songs don't get into peoples' heads and become a part of their life.
Australia had a thriving live music scene, and very healthy music sales, for decades, because bands had the enormous number of gigs to get good; they had passionate radio station support; a huge network of hype-friendly music media and many, many young people who wanted to travel 1-2 hours to a gig on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, regardless of the weather.
I don't know what the solution is, or how Australian music gets back what it once had, but it's a subject i will return to here.
I wrote a set of lyrics on all this and demoed a bunch of tunes from my words and thoughts with Suno and Udio.
"Australians don't want to hear
new Australian music anymore
Just 40 year old songs from INXS
Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil
Radio don't care about the new bands
Or any of their songs
This retro repeat nightmare
has been going on too long
It's been 40 fkng years long"
