Phil Tripp, Music & Tech Biz Visionary, Dies At 75

Phil Tripp, the Hawaiian shirt-clad media visionary and early tech adopter, has died aged 75 in a Coffs Harbour hospital.

Since arriving in 1981 from America, he shaped how the Australian music industry got set for opportunities in the digital era in the 1990s.

This included the biennial AustralAsian Music Business Conference, which the one-time entertainment and tech business writer for 100 outlets ran in Sydney for over 19 years.

It featured international tech and music industry speakers who spelled out to 700+ delegates the radical changes that were coming that changed consumer and industry behaviour and questioned concepts of copyright and record company transparency.

At the same time, his company IMMEDIA! published the AustralAsian Music Industry Directory for 23 years, which he started while bored in hospital after a heart attack.

It ambitiously detailed executive names and contact listings for every music, media, live and tech company in Australia, New Zealand and the Asian territories.

He also founded TheMusic.com.au.

Using contacts in Government to establish export links for Australian acts, he was the Australian, New Zealand and Hawaiian rep for South By Southwest (SXSW), actively working to build the number of music showcasing acts and delegates attending to 700 at its peak.

Born in Georgia, USA, Tripp was the first male in ten generations on both sides of his family who didn’t serve in the military. He grew his hair and became a sound engineer for Hanley Audio in the ‘70s, then went on the road as production and road manager for blues, rock, and jazz acts such as The Allman Brothers, Little Feat and Stephane Grappelli.

“The Australian consulate wasn’t that keen on me or my relative lack of qualifications. But I found the main guy was a fan of Stephane Grappelli, whom I was working with,” Tripp recounted to TheMusic.com.au. 

“I gave him two concert tickets and the chance to meet him backstage afterwards, and the next morning, I got my visa.”

He arrived in Sydney on Christmas Day 1981 with just 5,000 vinyl albums and a couple of guitars. He landed a job managing a major record store. He also opted to become a freelance journalist.

Within the first three months, he’d got a piece published in the mainstream media about financial discrepancies in one of the major record companies.

He targeted their MDs about practices against artists and pricing collusion, which resulted in the firing of two of them. He took on the Australian Record Industry Association over record pricing, which resulted in a major government inquiry that resulted in hefty penalties for some labels. 

It started a controversial run in the music industry where he was seen as a thorn in its side, as much as one who shaped it and defended its artists’ rights.

On his 60th birthday, he told friends, “It’s never too late to have a second happy childhood.” He sold off his various business concerns and semi-retired to a hillside property in Coffs Harbour, NSW.

There, he wrote crime books about his early days in US music (one which was to be turned into a movie), grew organic chilli peppers, wrote travel pieces, and fought his illnesses. Typical of Tripp, he used his tech knowledge to set up a security system in the property where someone who walked uninvited up the driveway would be met with loud sounds of cannons and machine gun fire.