Posts by Robyn Gallagher
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I have been going to gigs for over 20 years and there has always been a problem with people - especially guys - being dicks. It's not a 2016 problem or a "millennials" problem, it's a life problem.
In 2009 I went to a Cribs gig where I got hassled by a number of middle-aged men because I was moving to the music which was disturbing them while they attempted to film their serious music idol Johnny Marr on their little 2009 cellphones.
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to Heather Gaye,
I feel like Laneway’s crowd has moved away from hipster & toward.. something else.
It's similar to what happened with Big Day Out. It started out as kind of indie and alternative, but slowly grew to be more mainstream. The last BDO I went to (2008) was the first and only time I had a random dickhead yell random shit at me, and it felt like, ok, that's it for me and that'll probably be it for the BDO soon enough.
If punters aren't having an enjoyable time at a festival, they won't come back. If girls don't feel safe as a festival, they won't go. And if lots of girls aren't going, the boys eventually won't go either.
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Hard News: Music: The year the…, in reply to Angela Win,
For the near decade I lived in the UK, it never seemed like Christmas until I heard Snoopy’s Christmas, which no-one had heard of.
It’s actually most popular in New Zealand, one of those weird cultural moments!
Curiously enough, I never heard it until 1997, and that was via slightly younger friends who’d grown up with it and couldn’t imagine Christmas without it. It charted at No.9 in 1988, which was probably the moment for Gen Y kids to bond with it.
A few years ago the Royal Guardsmen recorded a new Snoopy song, the super strange “Snoopy vs Obama”. That’s right, it’s Snoopy taking down bin Laden.
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I feel like the second paragraph of this post is basically a mansplaining of "All I Want For Christmas is You". Tbh, the song is over 20 years old and anyone who hasn't heard it by now has essentially missed out on 20 Christmases without maximum levels of joy and cheer.
The weirdest thing - some people think it's an older song that Mariah Carey made famous with a cover. But no - she wrote it herself and it is very much a product of the 1990s.
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Another thing with Amplifier, for every act, there was a bio. Even if it was just a couple of sentences, it was usually enough to establish where the act was from, what kind of music they played, and probably also a list of band members.
While AudioCulture has excellent coverage of NZ bands and musicians, they tend to be ones who have significant careers. But the less successful emo bands or R&B crooners from the early '00s might only have an Amplifier profile as proof of their existence in the world of NZ music.
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The thing that unnerves me about the impending demise of Amplifier is its video archive. It has a decent selection of New Zealand music videos, many of which can't be found online anywhere else.
Amplifier uses a dated Windows Media format so it's complicated to watch on a Mac, but it can be done. But come 2016, at least 35 videos will be gone, with no other online source.
I'm a little upset about this.
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2015 was a really really weak year for New Zealand music in the top 40, which I think is due to streaming. It seems unless you're Six60, no other locals acts enjoy popularity on Spotify. That is, it's all very well to "support New Zealand music" by buying music on iTunes, but it no one's interested in listening to it on Spotify, it's not going to have much impact.
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Elsewhere, John Seabrook in the New Yorker tries to convince Adele that she’s going to destroy Spotify (and thus the entire music industry) by not immediately releasing 25 for streaming. I think not.
Adele doesn't even need to bother about streaming because she's shifting so many compact discs. The people who buy 25 are the sort who still listen to CDs and wouldn't even contemplate buying an album on iTunes.
It's like after the first series of The X Factor, there were Jackie Thomas fans posting to Facebook in a panicked state, making sure that they'd be able to purchase her album on CD.
As popular as the new J. Bieber album is, I bet it's not shifting anywhere near the percentage of CDs that Adele is.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Back to a…, in reply to Russell Brown,
“All the promoters out there are struggling at the moment because of low ticket sales. It’s a massive issue. Every single one of them. People need to get out there and they need to start supporting their local promoters and their local shows,” Talbot said.
Going to a show to "support" it is the worst reason. A festival shouldn't have to relay on emotional charity to survive. If it's a good show, people will want to see it just because it's good, not because they feel obliged to "support local music".
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Legal Beagle: Voting in the Flag Referendum, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
There are cynical bastards in our household who reckon the outcome is pre-determined.
It would be extremely difficult to actually do this, given that throughout the whole referendum process there are actual real people involved.
Unless the theory extends to some sort of 9/11-scale conspiracy where hundreds of people are paid off to keep silent for life. Tbh, I don't think the New Zealand government could manage an operation like that without at least something getting messed up.