Posts by Robbie Siataga
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Fair enough, sorry. I'll try to stay on point.
So what indies would these be Russell ? I been out of the loop for ages but wouldn' t mind knowing whos who and whos making plays.
and what's your take on this ?
if you've got major label distro you're more like an imprint than an indie.
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I'm filing it under 'discussions that need to be had with this list of people not in the room'.
Well if you haven't got anything to contribute and you're gonna get smarmy about it, then just run along eh ?...there's a good lad.
So lets just re-cap shall we...
Apart from Simon Grigg who has got something nice to say about Brendan personally and his past but not about his present and future.
And Russell bangin on about being bored while avoiding the finer points of some decent arguments and chiding us like errant children squatting in his sandpit.
Theres only the chorus of rejects, failures, whingers, artists, label owners, industry experts and the odd journo criticizing the system and by inference the personell running it.
sweet.. lets just carry on with the status quo then cos its obvious we dont know what the fuck we're talking about eh ?
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Hope you post back what Brendan says bout my idea Russ, and if he takes it on board with a change in selection policy, doesnt that prove my initial point about reluctance to post ideas that get co opted to maintain the status quo in NZoA personell ?
Brendan Smyth: I've been with NZ On Air since the beginning, 1989, when the agency was set up. Before that I was ten years at the Arts Council which is like the National Endowment for the Arts in America. At the Arts Council, I did the music job. At NZ On Air, I did the radio job, but that became a music-on-the-radio job. I created and still run all of NZ On Air's programs to get more New Zealand music on the radio. I've got no music credentials at all! I can't sing and I can't play the guitar, but I am a big fan.
http://prod1.cmj.com/articles/display_article.php?id=84047737
cos the thing is, how is he even remotely qualified to sit in judgment on the relative cultural and artistic merit or even commercial viability of songs if he's never been a muso, never ran a label, never contributed to creating a music vid and never ran a mile in those of us who have's shoes ?
it's like getting a hardcore boxing fan to judge a heavywieght fight or a rapid sports couch potatoed rugby junkie to coach the all blacks or John Key to judge 'kiwi idol' innit ?
now wheres my fucking pony ? No.. i dont want a gelded chestnut one I want an appaloosa and it better have some legs cos i'll want to ride it hard :)
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if you really want to go the d'n'b route Sacha, what aboutThe Upbeats ?
Correct me if i'm mistaken but 2 self funded albums ?... international critical acclaim, a shit load of 12" vinyl ?
another one of those, gotta make it overseas before you get a look in here ? i would wager the same could be said for concord dawn, though it doesnt hurt your chances if you had Dirty records pimping your shit and in their case maybe another one of those, fund the pimp rather than fund the artist jobs ?
its hardly cheap slagging off, i ever dug concord dawn. they didn't innovate, they imitated the more "commercial" aspects of drum and bass/techstep at that time and were arguably clones of Bad Company or a shitload of other soundalikes who cloned the )EI3( sound. I much preferred Bulletproof in that vein.
and if you're gonna rep them champ, then at least spell their name properly. There's no H in conchord.
edit...OK morninnnnnnnnnnngggggggggggggggggggg light had its moments :)
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Conchord Dawn commercial? Don't make me laugh
commercial drum n bass as opposed to some really out there shit like Tays hakaider and audio slut incarnations.
http://www.myspace.com/theaudioslut
He was/is an an underground legend, a true pioneer and inspiration to countless foreign acts. concord dawn were cloned poo.
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Nesian Mystik's album was released in 2002 and went on to 4X platinum. Bic Runga's Beautiful Collision came out the same year and went 11x platinum.
Scribe's first was in 2003 -- 5x platinum and massive cultural cut-through. Through this period, NZ music in general had a growing share of a declining overall market.
Thats little to do with NZonAir funding and everything to do with the artists quality of songwriting and in the hiphoppers case, the lower costs of production, the availability of technology, the rise of alternative media as a means of promotion and marketing and the openness of radio to finally support foreign hiphop.
The local hiphop stuff was built off the back of a lot of groundwork in the underground and it was dumb luck that those guys were around to capitalise on the groundswell of public support and changing attitudes.
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he seems to be well up on the actual govt docs
Oh cmon, just read the parts of the Act linked here
Brendan Smyth himself has said the act is the mandate
Honestly, I kinda doubt that many of the artists would agree.
They're hardly likely to say otherwise though are they ?...especially if they want to keep their snouts in the trough.
BTW check the edit to my last post :)
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No, honest, there wasn't. What experience the indie sector had came largely from the live music scene
oh right i wasnt talking about the indie sector i was talking about the expertise and infrastructure of the major labels the personell of which always knew the importance of publishing and copyright collection.
and to what extent has NZoA really supported the indie scene or supports it now ?
but even so weren't there a lot more experienced and savvy promoters back then because the focus was more on the live scene ? less so now with more readily available formats for exposure and consequently less opportunities for generating higher revenue.
Are you really saying the artists I listed earlier would have made better records with no support whatsoever?
Or Conchord Dawn (two albums funded), Dimmer (two albums, 14 videos) and King Kapisi (two albums, bunch of other stuff)?
Probably. Without the handout and having to rely on your own talent might mean you'd produce a better quality work without having to compromise to commercial interests to satisfy the funding benefactor and minus the safety net of not having to recoup your loss if your album tanks cos it's already written off by NZoA.
I mean, didn't you say the dole functioned effectively as a form of artist support. It certainly would have made you leaner, meaner, hungrier and stronger for it and would weed out those whose calling wasnt music as art.
I think there's a big difference between saying the scheme needs a revamp and claiming it's actually harmed artists who have received funding to make their music.
I dont. Deceptikonz and Dawnraid has lost a lot of it's hiphop fanbase by changing their focus to suit the funding criteria. Before they went bankrupt they were good and credible, now they're mostly shit and lacking cred.
if the system were revamped to support what they were good at they'd still be shit hot. subsidising them has virtually artistically neutered them. And perhaps what it does show is that without the funding subsidy indie lables can't survive.
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But also: we tend to forget how developed the music sector is now. When I first started writing about it, in the early 1980s (no shit!) there was a lack of infrastructure and expertise. There simply weren't people with the skills, and that really cost opportunities for a generation of artists.
The fact that that's changed is fairly strongly related to public sector support for the industry, which has given the industry structure and visibility. It's much, much more sophisticated than it used to be.
I'd say it's more to do with sophisticated technology increasing production values, decreasing the cost while easing the means for distribution and because of it theres way more competition now which drives up quality.
There was probably an equal or more amount of expertise within the existing infrastructure back then. It was just harder and comparatively more expensive to do shit back in the day.
Still cant go past the fact that what makes it hard has always been the gatekeepers. I'm not buying the much much more sophisticated angle. Thats more like smoke and mirrors than a reflection of complexity. The structure hasn't changed fuck all.
So even without public sector support, NZ artists would still be cranking out amazing music and probably of a higher quality if, for the last 10 years, public sector support, by way of funding weren't geared towards commercial radio.
The visibilty then still only applies to that narrow focus. Theres still multiple facets of the industry largely invisible to public sector support.
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The main mission is to make sure that New Zealand culture and identity is well represented on the New Zealand airwaves so that we are not swamped by imported culture. NZ On Air is fundamentally a funding agency , mostly funding programs that will get played on radio and television—
, we fund albums by bands with good airplay prospects; we fund nearly 200 music videos a year; we have a new artist discovery program where we seek out unsigned bands and fund a debut radio single; we fund networked or syndicated New Zealand music shows for radio
under the Broadcasting Act, which is NZ On Air's mandate , we are also challenged to get more New Zealand music played on the radio,...
- Brendan Smyth
http://prod1.cmj.com/articles/display_article.php?id=84047737
Whats happened is, to fit the format of commercial radio and to compete for funding, artists are forced to become local clones of imported culture to the extent that any sense of local identity and culture is lost. The more identical the clone to foreign culture the more likely they are to be funded. Once again let's take Dawnraid's recent output as an example.
The points of difference that make NZ music easily culturally identifiable is generally what precludes it from being suitable for mainstream commercial broadcast so less likely to get funded. Take The Bats quotes in an above post as an example.
The broadcasting act while acting as the mandate does allow for cultural content to be aired across the full spectrum of broadcasters not just commercial radio. Interpreted in it's narrowest sense to favour only commercial radio/tv is straight BS. Take this previous post as an example.
http://publicaddress.net/system/topic,2474,hard-news-changing-times.sm?p=164220#post164220
As i have alluded to, their is scope within the act for the broadcast of non comercial radio focussed music on TV via specialist genre themed shows with the same being applied to radio to the extent that stations previously deemed non commercial such as the B-net have since changed to fit the narrow commercial interpretation NZ on Air continues to adhere to.
New Zealand on Air, negotiates and leverages domestic popular music artists onto commercial radio. In this process, state agents mobilise social networks to ‘join-up’ commercially appropriate artists to radio programmers. The success of this programme is based upon state agents developing an institutional isomorphism with existing music industry practices. Even so, popular music makers contest New Zealand on Air’s sympathetic policy settings by citing forms of institutional exclusion .
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=1890072
i cant get the full access paper. Maybe someone else can but just from the abstract...
the institutional isomorphism manifests itself by NZon Air acting essentially as A&R/marketing/promotion arm of what a commercially profit driven record label would normally do in compiling demos in the form of 'kiwi discs' and employing radio pluggers to lobby stations.
we produce the Kiwi Hit Disc, which is a sampler disc of new New Zealand music that we deliver to every radio station in the land every month; and we employ radio pluggers to promote the Kiwi Hit Disc at radio. All up, we spend NZ$5.5 million a year on promoting New Zealand music.
- Brendan Smyth
citing forms of institutional exclusion speaks to the effective blacklisting and silencing of critics to NZoAirs practises/personell and the implied cronyism to which NZonAir can continually favour certain people/labels/artists with funding with no accountability for its decisions.