Sounds Australia Coordinator Says Current Live Music Scene Is 'Extremely Healthy'

National Live Music Coordinator for Sounds Australia Ianto Ware has a simple solution to ensuring our nation's live music scene survives and thrives.

"Musicians. It sounds simple but people making music is the most important thing for a music scene," he said in an interview with theMusic.com.au ahead of his participation in this Friday's first ever TILT (Tomorrow's Ideas Leading Today) forum.

"Often we forget this when we talk about regulation, or industry, or downloads, or funding and policy. Those things are all secondary; we should begin by looking at what gets people playing music and allows them to keep doing it. Everything else flows from that."

Ware also believes that a lot of the general public don't realise how difficult it can be to get a band or performer locked in for a live gig.

"I don't think people fully appreciate how harsh some of the policies are because they're often buried in really obscure and extremely dull pieces of regulation," he said. "But in my home town of Adelaide, to use a good example, you need permission from the Council and the licensing authorities to make art, music or dance, but not to sit around watching a screen in a pub."

This is something that the National Cultural Policy has changed in spades, according to Ware, who thinks the said policy is the most important change to the local live scene over the past year.

"The National Cultural Policy came out and legitimised the idea that regulation has been having a negative impact on Australian culture," he added. "That's the single biggest thing I think has happened in a decade. In the past, when our venues were shut down we were told it was because we were a nuisance, or a safety hazard or a health risk, but with that policy there's a much broader acceptance that the existing systems are unnecessarily harsh."

In terms of how the live industry is fairing at the moment, Ware is 50/50 on the subject, with the internet having both a positive and negative impact and the reality that music isn't a fulltime job for everyone. But he thinks the industry is doing very well at the moment considering these things.

"On the one hand, it's extremely healthy," he said. "Music is easier to access, record and engage with than it has been in decades. The indie and punk scenes that I grew up with are probably stronger and more interesting now than they were twenty years ago.

"On the downside, the regulatory impact on smaller venues and rehearsal spaces has been extremely negative and the impact of the internet on established ways of doing things means we're still living in a bit of a vacuum. So it's a great time to be making and listening music, but it is harder to access the kind of resources that mean you can quit your day job and focus on music full time."

Ware will speak at the new forum, along with several other industry experts, this Friday 5 July at at the Australian Institute of Music in Sydney.