'We’re Not Here To Profit Off Artists': All-Australian Music Station LAMP Is Giving New Artists A Glow-Up
Passionate music-lover Brett 'Freo' Freeman has hit play on his radio station LAMP, playing 100% new Australian music with plans to take it into major retailers around the country.
LAMP's Brett Freeman (Credit: Supplied)
Brett ‘Freo’ Freeman could be forgiven for taking his own radio show and using it to platform his band and those of his buddies.
But as a music-lover first and foremost, it would be completely and inherently out of character for the Melbourne-outskirts native, and also combative with the new fight he’s taken upon himself – launching a radio station playing 100% new Australian music with plans to take the service into major retailers around the country.
“You walk into a store or you switch on commercial radio and just hear the same music, all the time,” he exclaims. “It's the hits of the past, or if you turn on Spotify, the algorithms [have traditionally been] geared towards international artists.
“You put social media on, and the music that comes through there is usually curated by an international ‘someone’. It’s not new and it’s not Australian.”
This realisation is by no means sudden or uncommon to most like Freo who have been in or around the industry for decades. As a passionate music-consumer, musician and as the host of the Mad Mile Music Club on Dandenong Ranges-based community radio station 3MDR, he is extremely cognisant of the incredible new music talent consistently created in Australia.
“But there is no dedicated place to hear them, and little chance that listeners will incidentally run into them, because of the way steaming and social media algorithms run, the music that’s played in shops, and even despite the best efforts of our local and national broadcasters – it’s old hits and not Australian.”
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Enter Freo’s venture – LAMP aka the Local Australian Music Platform, which he has recently soft-launched as an online radio station. LAMP plays new Australian music, with a mantra to promote and platform artists in a fair, ethical, and sustainable way.
This passion to ensure new, local artists get a look-in is not just to ensure Freo’s ticket through the pearly white gates one day, nor is it a new concept.
Zooming out and with an economic lens, things are looking rosy for Australian music in some respects. This year, Music Australia's economic study The Bass Line: Charting The Economic Contribution Of Australia's Music Industry found composition, songwriting and music publishing contributed $470 million in revenue, with approximately 20% earned from overseas markets.
But Australasian Performing Right Association Limited (APRA) and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (AMCOS) CEO Dean Ormson said: “We've seen a 31% collapse in local content on streaming platforms over five years. This isn't happening because our music isn't good enough, and our surging export revenues prove our artists are among the best in the world.
“Our platforms are borderless, but algorithms favour scale and international repertoire dominate by default.”
When Freo launched his weekly all-Australian radio show, he indeed knew the algorithms were already weighted towards international artists and tried and true classics on other streaming and broadcast services. But the appetite for new Australian content was still evidently strong.
It didn’t take long for the requests for interviews to come flooding in, but it wasn’t the radio host requesting interviews from the bands, the PR agencies and record labels.
“As soon as I launched the show, I started to get contacted by PR agents, managers, by artists themselves,” he explains. “Next thing you know, I'm interviewing them. And I'm like, ‘How the fuck did this happen to our corner of the bloody internet?’
“Now I get music sent to me all the time. ‘Freo, can you interview this guy? Freo, can you put this guy’s music on your show?’
“I'm not, by no means, the only one that's doing 100% Australian music on community radio, but they are few and far between,” he continues. “triple j Unearthed is very important for new Australian artists, but they’re kind of already talking to their own market, whereas we want to reach a bunch of different audiences.
“The fact that I was attracting all this attention from artists, agents, managers, and even, to some extent, some record labels, and being asked to interview people and showcase their music, that's what was the catalyst for it – because I turned around and went, they shouldn't be talking to me. I'm just one little guy who has a band and does the radio show.”
The percentage of Australian music played by public and commercial broadcasters is mandated to a degree according to the individual station’s charters, with support and promotion of local acts managed through various government entities such as the Australian Communications And Media Authority.
“But [even with Australian music mandated in] charters, they don't tell you that you have to play new stuff,” he says. "I mean, you can just play another Cold Chisel song; they're probably still playing Electric Blue by Icehouse from 1984 or whatever it was.
“Nothing against Iva Davies of course; great band. But still, it's not new music.”
It’s this ilk of classic Australian rock and pop that Freo said dominates the retail music market, too. Which is what gave birth to the second arm of LAMP currently in development – a suite of genre-specific LAMP stations for retailers to play in their stores.
Bunnings, BCF, Coles – they’re all in Freo’s sights (and it’s worth noting that there is such a thing as Coles Radio), but he’s starting with the little guys first.
“Let's say you're the local barbershop and you want to play indie punk or something like that,” he explains. “You can go to LAMP and play indie punk – it suits your brand, it suits your store.
“If we can create a place where there's incidental contact with Australian music, that's a win.”
Freo is well on his way to seeing his grand plans come to life, with LAMP already on air playing new, Australian music.
It’s a humble set-up for now (“my home office, four guitars hanging up, a record player, a computer and an internet connection”), surrounded by a small team of equally passionate music lovers who have the production, sales, advertising skills to ensure LAMP has the potential to thrive alongside its commercial and public broadcast counterparts.
“We’re not here to profit off artists,” he explains. “We don't need another company making a coin off the back of people’s art.
“I don’t think younger people now have any less passion for music than the people that were around in the halcyon days of the late ‘90s and early 2000s; it's just that they're not exposed to it in the same way now.
“All these modern factors to access new music have changed the dynamics, and we just need to adjust the dynamics so that we can get good, new Australian music back in front of people - that's why we're doing this.”
The Local Australian Music Platform (LAMP) is available to listen to now via their website.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
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