OP-ED: There's No Point Reliving Rock's Glory Days When There's Work To Do Here And Now

From algorithmic fatigue to rising costs, Aussie live music is facing a perfect storm. Emily Rockit explains why capacity building and making live music more accessible is more important now than ever.

Emily Rockit Profile

IRL. The fact that we now need an acronym for experiences that happen 'in real life' says a lot about why the live music industry is currently under pressure. Between our devices and wide-screen televisions, many of us aren't as compelled to participate as we once were.

Growing up in South-West Sydney in the ‘80s, my life revolved around live music. I was lugging PAs and playing pubs in a rock band at 16. Live music was the pulse everything else orbited around.

My ride-or-die crew and I would catch the long train to Sydney, Central for the Kings Cross line, chasing gigs at the Kardomah Cafe followed by Springfields up the road, till the wee hours. That dark little cavernous womb felt more like home than home did.

In the late ‘80s, the Kardomah featured pub and glam rock bands like The Screaming Jets, the Candy Harlots, and The Poor. I'd rock my little heart out as often as humanly possible, endlessly inspired by the creative vibrancy and a tribe that felt like extended family.

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Watching the live scene strain under ever increasing pressures as the decades rolled on, I cradled a quiet reverence for those late-’80s memories, often reflecting on how lucky I was to have experienced what I thought of as a golden era for live musicians in Australian history.

However, recently reading Most People I Know (Think That I'm Crazy), Billy Thorpe's biography of Melbourne's live scene in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, my assumption was challenged.

He recalls "somewhere around forty live music gigs in and around Melbourne every week," with venues that "featured four or five local, original bands a night, Thursdays through Sundays, playing to packed-out crowds of up to 1,500 rabid local music fans."

Only the pubs served alcohol back then, and every other venue in Melbourne existed purely for local live music. Turns out the ‘80s may not have been the peak after all.

Regardless, both pockets of glory shine bright against the sobering reality of the 2020s. While the scene is brimming with creativity and diversity, our artists are facing structural challenges that are making it increasingly difficult to focus on simply being an artist.

More than 1,300 venues have closed since the pandemic, a quarter of the national scene, with NSW alone losing 551. Insurance premiums have skyrocketed, squeezing venues that now compete with an endless stream of 24/7 entertainment at home.

Add the downtrend in youth drinking (from around 70% of teens in 2001 to about three in ten now, a positive shift, but one more thing siphoning foot traffic from bar-reliant venues), plus residential complaints killing off great venues, and it’s a perfect storm.

Then there's the algorithm.

Streaming doesn't reward discovery the way your buddy dragging you along to a gig does; it rewards what you already like, on repeat, until you forget there's a vibrant music scene buzzing two suburbs away. The tastemakers are competing with powerful code.

But wait, there's more: the cost-of-living crisis, habitual last-minute buying habits of gig-goers, and fixation with gargantuan international acts in favour of emerging locals.

Maybe it's the flooded market, a multitude of artists, so people default to what they know or what the major label machine has the budget to shove in front of them.

So what's the solution? As much as I sometimes yearn for an ‘80s time machine, there's no point reliving glory days when there's work to do here and now.

Twenty-plus years in artist services has highlighted a major contributor: the onus is now on small and mid-tier artists to build their careers single-handedly. Where there was once a team managing business and marketing, artists must now wear every hat, and burnout and overwhelm are becoming the new normal.

This is where capacity building comes in.

It's in finding ways to support artists to build infrastructure around their artistic vision in a way that enables them to take it on the road, meeting artists where they are, speaking their language, and bridging the divide between dry, jargon-heavy industry resources and something they enjoy consuming.

The other piece is finding new ways to make live music more accessible.

A concept that spawned my upcoming record store pop-up tour. Activating cultural spaces and bringing live music to all-ages audiences. Building community, feeding the ecosystem and giving people more reasons to show up.

Which brings me back to IRL. The acronym exists because real life has stiff competition these days.

I can't reverse the digital era, nor would I want to, and I can't resurrect 1960s Melbourne. But I can produce accessible events where music lovers exchange ideas in a public forum, rather than a comments section.

Call it my small, stubborn contribution to coaxing us back to IRL. The place where the magic truly happens.

Emily Rockit is the author of Louder Than Life: The Touring Musician's Handbook, currently touring record stores nationally to celebrate its independent release.