OPINION: Does The Australian Music Industry Need More Critique?

Here For Good Agency recently took to Instagram to ask: “Does Australia need its own Anthony Fantano? Why a lack of critique might be holding us back…”. I cannot express how excited I was to see someone else address what I think is one of the most important topics in Australian music.

For those who don’t know, Anthony Fantano is famous for his often brutal critiques of artists big and small. When he likes someone, he can be extremely positive, but you only have to take a look at his response to Lawrence’s new track to see how blunt he can be.

@theneedletok

stop doing this

♬ Whatcha Want - Lawrence

Critique is a hot topic in the arts. Artists complaining about critics is nothing new, but nowadays, discussions around criticism are laden with often misused terms like “gate-keeping” and “hot take”.

As an artist and critic, I’ve personally been on both sides of the equation, and I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret of the industry: the overwhelming majority of ‘reviews’ you read online were written by the artists themselves.

When, as an artist, you have a new release, you submit it to online publications. The goal is publicity and reviews you can use for legitimacy. There’s a whole layer of review sites that ask you to pay-to-play to have a review published. Then there are sites that have you apply via a third party where, again, you pay, and finally, sites that let you submit for free.

Overwhelmingly, however, these sites will just publish the press release you supply verbatim. Seriously, Google a song by one of your favourite local artists and add the word ‘review’ to the end. Then, check out how many of the reviews are eerily similar. That’s because they’re not reviews, not really; they’ve just posted the artist’s press release online. And it’s not just small blogs you’ve never heard of, some of the bigger blogs are on in this lark too.

The issue is quite simply that there’s no money in online blogs anymore. Even the bigger international websites have either shuttered or are on life support. Many that were once serious tastemakers now exist purely as low-grade click-bait farms. What does exist are blogs run mainly by volunteers who interview artists or go to shows to write reviews for free.

Increasingly, there’s no writing at all, and these kinds of critiques have moved to places like TikTok. But here, again, they’re working for free. This is especially true in Australia, where we don’t have incentives like the TikTok Creator’s Fund, which gives content makers money for views. However, this lack of pay brings with it two related problems: a lack of professionalism and relentless positivity.

Given that almost no one in the music critique space in this country is being paid, it makes sense that there is a lack of professional ethics. Critics see themselves more as content creators and fans. This means they’re not doing basic things like acknowledging free tickets, conflicts of interest, or personal relationships they have with the people they’re writing about. Also, much of the appeal of doing the work is getting those free tickets and having access to artists. This leads to the biggest issue: relentless positivity. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by here for good agency (@hereforgoodagency)

The Australian music scene, from triple j down to the smallest content creator, is so full of hype and buzz that any critique is essentially meaningless. This kind of nonsense hurts artists and fans alike. Imagine being a small band, putting out a release and getting five-star reviews across the board, only to find out you can’t get anyone to a show and no label is interested. If no one tells you they don’t like your track, let alone why, how are you supposed to improve?

And then there’s the fan experience. You see all this buzz online about an artist, but when you go to see them, they’re, well… shit. It would be easy to assume, based on the buzz, that this is the best the local scene has to offer. Then it’s easy to decide maybe the problem is the local scene itself.

There are some deeper things at play here, too. And please come at me in the comments on this one because you’ll be proving my point—but Australians are notoriously thin-skinned. Seriously.

We can dish it, but we absolutely cannot take it. Just look at the number of people unironically explaining why Raygun is a national treasure. That whole situation was just straight fucked. But in general, this is an issue in our culture. The preferred academic term is ‘cultural cringe’, and if you have the time to read into it, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the national psyche.

But when it comes to the music scene, it creates two seemingly opposite but ultimately related problems. The first is that we kind of (as a whole, not individually) hate our own cultural products. There’s a reason Aussie artists struggle while international acts fill stadiums, and elsewhere, the Australian film industry is on life-support, despite the fact that, as a nation, we still love to go the movies. And don’t get me started on the need for an international celebrity at every local awards show to make it seem “legit”. 

The second problem is that we refuse to hear any real criticism of our own cultural products. We cringe at them, but we also think they are beyond reproach. It's a weird form of cognitive dissonance and far too big a subject to cover here—but the long and the short of it is that we don’t actually have a local culture of solid musical discourse. 

And the thing is, we have the talent, but if we want our scene to blossom, we need to have the structures in place to support it. If you look at eras when Australian music was booming both domestically and internationally, you’ll also find masses of local music critics and big-name music journos putting in the hard yards. Think Countdown. Think Recovery. 

There aren’t easy answers. While the industry relies on volunteers, it will be a hard needle to shift. But we can start with this: if something is shit, say so. And say why. If you’re a reviewer, remember this: your good reviews are meaningless if you never give a bad one. And if you’re an artist and you get a bad review, take on board the criticism where it’s valid and use it to make you stronger.

The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the publisher.