Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Secondly, I don’t think anyone is suggesting such but in the early days of NZoA radio did slowly start playing things that were pushing their range. Chains for example or Hip Hop Holiday both sounded like songs from another planet when added to commercial radio in NZ, both building via Mai and B-Net. Supergroove are another. The last two were also extraordinarily successful beyond our shores for the same reason. Even now, when I hear Can’t Get Enough in Asia, where it gets gold airplay, it stands out. And that’s why it worked.
Can't disagree with that at all. What policy do you put in place to ensure we get those results, though? Clearly, commercial radio still has a huge role to play, because it's what the very large majority of potential fans listen to.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to kevin russell,
although I suppose it depends on how you define “New Zealand’s musical culture”
kind of invalidates the rant.
Well, no it doesn't. The Mayes paper never spells it out. And it's a good question. How would you answer it?
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to kevin russell,
Commercial Radio doesn’t want to change. They don’t want to expand their play lists, and they don’t, with the odd rare exception.
I don’t like commercial music radio and I don’t listen to it, although a hell of a lot of people clearly do. But, you know, a lot of those radio people were delighted to have local stars at hand. I’ll never forget hearing Goldenhorse doing a live-to-air on (I think) More FM during NZ Music Month – two years before they’d been strictly bNet material. I mentioned it in the blog and one of the DJs got in touch to say he and others had urged their PD to do it, and to playlist the record.
Commercial radio people might be weird, but they’re not ogres, and it’s no basis for good policy to treat them as such.
Why pretend any different. 25 years ago we had Dragon Golden Harvest, Space Waltz and Split Enz on our commercial airwaves, in prime time.
Don’t kid yourself. Split Enz and Space Waltz got into prime-time via a light-ent talent show and Golden Harvest were a one-hit wonder put together by an old-school entertainment promoter (love the tunes though!).
‘Poi E’? Radio didn’t want to know. No one played Moana’s A.E.I.O.U. because it had Maori in the chorus. That really changed with the advent of Mai FM – whose adoption of an urban music format was also really influential. Check out the NZ airplay charts for last week – about half of it’s hip hop and R&B.
To us, it largely sounds like standard genre fare. But to the kids who buy Vince Harder, maybe it does actually sound like them. And I really liked that big medley thing that Harder, Jay Williams et al did to open the Music Awards this year. I liked the fact that we have enough R&B stars for a medley. It was cool.
as Simon says, now we get predominantly artists chosen for their ability to sound like something already on the play list. is that really as much of a progression as you’d have us believe?
I’ve said repeatedly that I think the broadcast music funding scheme needs fixing, and has done for some time. And that the influence of radio programmers on funding decisions has become too great, and there need to be other ways of measuring success. But the idea that it was better in the old days can’t really be sustained on the facts.
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I think the idea that there has been no progress at all in “get-ting more of New Zealand’s musical culture on air” in 20 years is absurd, although I suppose it depends on how you define “New Zealand’s musical culture”.
So are you just pretending to not understand the finer details of the original point
No, I'm not pretending.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Simon Grigg,
It may be worth noting (although I'm perhaps reading too much into it given the times) that the album by The Naked and Famous failed, with all the hype, to even go gold. Lots of albums in our country still reach that mark though and yet this record, all over the radio, failed to excite 7500 people to buy the long player (I'm not hating on them either BTW).
It went gold last month, three months after release. Also #1, and 'Young Blood' topped the singles and airplay charts. That's really not bad going for a debut album.
And no matter how you dice it, it's still going to be the artists who work at a professional level, market themselves well and cultivate fans and friends who'll do well.
In that sense, the fact that the people making funding decisions couldn't see that, say, Homebrew had something going on for themselves is alarming. I think that's where a disconnect is really showing.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Simon Grigg,
I'm perhaps the very last person to disagree with that. Of course I can remember and I think it's a mighty thing that the Radioscope chart for 2010 had such a New Zealand dominance.
And yet the paper is full of unsupported and unsustainable statements like that. Just making things up isn't a good basis for getting the solution right.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Simon Grigg,
There is arguably more meat in Rob Mayes’ independent report and it’s only 10 pages long. I understand he’s had off the record support from former NZoA board members.
It get its core point, but I think you’re being very generous about many of its prescriptions. Let’s pluck out this bit:
4) Seek alternatives.
Commercial radio has been indifferent to the objective of get- ting more of New Zealand’s musical culture on air. 20 years and many millions of dollars have got us essentially no closer to expanding their scope. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge this and seek alternatives to achieving the same goal.I think the idea that there has been no progress at all in “get-ting more of New Zealand’s musical culture on air” in 20 years is absurd, although I suppose it depends on how you define “New Zealand’s musical culture”. I’d have thought, say, The Naked & Famous being all over the radio last year and Smashproof the year before would be pretty significant examples to the contrary. If you really think there has not been a significant improvment in radio’s engagement with local music in 20 years, you basically can’t remember what it was like 20 years ago.
a) Non-commercial radio.
Follow the BBC’s example of Radio One, which features a wide variety of sounds on a government owned network. With an attractive playlist that does include ‘Our’ sounds.That would be nice. But the chances of a dedicated non-commercial contemporary music station on the taxpayer’s coin are precisely nil.
It has worked before with Channel Z, a local network in the early 2000s that featured large amounts of local content mixed with current cutting edge music. It was highly successful in creating an appreciation of New Zealand sounds with its audience.
Unfortunately, not very many people actually listened to it; fewer than bFM or George by the end (admittedly that was after Mediaworks had given its strong Auckland frequency to The Rock, which went on to be a raging success).
The BBC is proactive in representing British culture with special recording sessions to profile new material being a part of their regular schedule.
It might have been polite to do some research into exactly what Radio New Zealand is already doing in this vein. How many live shows have been expertly recorded and mixed by Andre Upston?
The whole report carries on as if Radio NZ – which is funded via NZ On Air – does nothing for contemporary NewZealand music, when in fact its programming in that line has become better and better.
They also appeal to a broad range of listeners including youth and current demographics, something Radio NZ does not at present do.
Sigh … again, compare what airs now to what aired 10 years ago. Listen to the Saturday music programming. Listen, even, the the kind of music that gets programmed into something like Nine To Noon.
The precedent for government owned enterprises going into competition with privately owned ones is already set with Kiwi Bank a ‘Government Bank’ competing with privately owned commercial banks. Support the creation of a competitive and professional network that will play our culture.
I submit that publicly funding a new radio station to directly compete against commercial radio stations in an extremely crowded radio market would be a very poor use of limited resources.
7) Lobby for increased funds.
Why has NZOA stayed practically stagnant against inflation for almost the entirety of its existence? Why hasn’t the organisation built on its success and pushed for and procured more funds to work with?Actually, Brendan Smyth, the guy they’re perennially hating on, did just that, more than once. You can certainly argue about the effectiveness of some schemes, but the idea that Smyth didn’t win new money is palpably wrong.
12) Expand the Hit Disc programme. Reinstate the deleted Indie Hit Disc which catered to existing NZ radio formats and expand the Disc programme to cater to other genre specific targets to not only make this music avail- able for play at present and future times but also to present a visible and permanent record of our culture as it progresses.
Oh please fucking no: print up even more Hit Discs? Who in the fucking real world of independent music in 2011 gets their stuff to interested parties on CD?
It’s a job for a secure online hub, with MP3s for sampling and optional WAV files. It would be cheaper, more flexible and more effective.
The report’s sole contribution to ideas about how the internet can be embraced in the broadcast funding environment is this: “Why not a YouTube channel set up to present NZ music?” Ironically, in the same paragraph, the report accuses NZ On Air of being off the pace with this new-fangled internet thing:
b) The internet.
How many people discover and watch videos via terrestrial TV any more? No one with a decent internet connection does. An increasing number of music followers use YouTube and myspace for music video discovery. If this is the case then commercial radio criteria becomes irrelevant. The question must be asked, why has it taken so long to get in line with this very obvious trend?Actually, the edict has been for about three years that all NZOA-funded videos should also be available on YouTube, typically via the artist’s own channel.
I think the onus should be on the recipient to make best use of wonderful tools like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, YouTube, LastFM, etc. I think that Amplifier has a special claim to being a media organisation as well as a retailer.
How you define expectations – and measure results – is an intriguing question, but it’s one worth answering. But there’s none of that in this report. The word “internet” appears in only one paragraph in the whole report.
Like I said Simon, I think you’re being very generous.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 1: Beach…, in reply to Islander,
I will not make you drool with what we had,
Well, it's a bit late for that! You had me with the pound of whitebait for Christmas breakfast ...
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I believe before Baycorp gets involved the world bank gives you money on the basis that you restructure your whole economy and welfare system and your people riot in the streets.
And you don’t get the money until you can prove that it’s a proper riot in the streets. A few bored kids biffing bottles won’t cut it. iirc, some public shit has to get set on fire.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Peter Cox,
Maybe I’m being unfair but that thing kinda reads to me like John Drinnan simply just doesn’t *like* the whole damn film/television/music industry.
It’s part of a disturbing culture of entitlement and taxpayer dependency for film, television and music people who believe they are owed a living. So what if Nana has to wait an extra year for her hip operation?
Parts of that column were so cheap and lazy it made me really angry. The “grandma’s hip operation” argument is worthless: all governments allow a budget for many things that are not a matter of literal life and death. Arts and broadcast funding along the current lines is part of every party’s policy but Act’s.
Are Drinnan’s greedy creatives rolling in it? Hardly. Their baseline funding has been frozen for two years and is likely to remain so for some time. The NZOA broadcast music funding pool every year is $5 million. The annual health budget is $13.6 billion – nearly 3000 times greater. Does it really even make any sense to compare them?
And although it’s more his style to be worked by his sources than actually read reports, he should perhaps have a look at Chris Caddick’s report for NZ On Air on music funding – Caddick remarks on how everyone he talked to was conscious of wanting to do justice to the taxpayer’s investment. Caddick gives the impression he encountered the opposite of a culture of entitlement.
And it bugs me that he continually implies that Hobbit-style tax breaks come straight off the country’s bottom line. As I understand it, they’re narrowly revenue-positive – ie, compared to the film not being made here – and that doesn’t account for taxes on the personal income and spending of New Zealanders employed, or spin-off benefits in terms of creative infrastructure and tourism.
Taxpayers gave Annabel Fay’s record company a $50,000 subsidy while her dad, Sir Michael, put up thousands of dollars to helicopter in commercial radio DJs and a public servant funding executive to their Great Mercury Island hideaway for a promotional gig.
Something is surely wrong when the Government attacks financially strapped public radio as wasteful, but gives subsidies for pop pap to people who can afford to pay their own way.
This is such a terrible argument. Yes, it looks a bit off when Annabel Fay’s label gets album funding and then later on her father lays on the chopper to fly some DJs over to Mercury Bay.
But show me the rule that would exclude Annabel Fay without unfairly penalising the independent record label (Siren) that is the party actually applying for and receiving the funding. Would record labels have to find out whether anyone in a band they want to sign has rich folks?
But Drinnan’s proposal for a means test is sillier than that. When he wrote about this recently, he basically implied NZOA album funding was some sort of social welfare benefit. Hardly. It’s not only contestable funding, it’s matched funding: the party that applies for $50k must be able to put up $50k of its own. The idea of applying a means test to a scheme that requires the applicant to have money is ridiculous, a complete and utter non-sequitir.
And – although realistically only the most successful records fully recoup – the funding is also recoupable. Much as I think Fay’s music is absurd and her father a wretch, her record is probably more likely to recoup than most.
Anyway, Caddick recommends that the present album funding be scrapped in favour of a “track-based” approach that takes into account performance in online media and student radio. I’ll write about that, but for now I think I’ll go and watch the cricket.