New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it

There’s a guy in Wellington making a photocopied weekly gig guide which will do more for the local music scene than this attempt at making a profitable social media. I guarantee it.

http://www.theimage04.com

> Live performance revenue reached $329 million, well above pre-Covid levels.

Is that inflation-adjusted? And as the article points out, very little of that is local talent, so it's likely some of that's due to the cost of tickets.

As someone who lived in NZ (although Wellington) for 10 years until last year, the local music scene was there, but at least in Wellington, the change in the 10 years I was there was considerable: The earthquake in 2016 progressively caused several venues on Cuba Street to close due to building regulations, and Covid was a significant shock as well, with some of the smaller (although most places in Wellington were small!) gig rooms / bars / breweries that would often host bands closing.

There was still Valhalla, San Fran, The Rogue & Vagabond and others, but it just didn't feel as much was going on other than for things like Cuba Dupa street festival, etc, or the Jazz weekends that would be held.

As the article points out, this is not localised to NZ, it's happening in Australia and the UK as well in terms of venues/pubs closing and live music not being quite the draw it once was because of that.

This para is a salutary lesson for all of us:

"This is not a New Zealand quirk. It is the local edge of a global collapse. Pitchfork, the most influential music publication in the world, was folded into GQ in 2024 and its editor-in-chief was laid off. Local music press has been gutted in the US, the UK and Australia. New Zealand just got there first and hardest, because we were small to begin with."

Aotearoa (NZ) has fired up the four way flashers. We ignore it at our peril.

I like that this is bringing out all the kiwi accounts. I've never seen so many of us all in one post. Hey guys! I'm a wannabe software engineer who's in Wellington, I had self-taught myself fairly well until LLMs has made me question if I completely wasted my 20s on what could now be a fools dream. Hope you're all going well!

Always looking for ways to spread community in our recalcitrant people, I'm not sure this is the right direction but it's a goal worth attempting until it works. Well done!

I think the content of the article highlights the exact reason why the music died. Large portions of the text are simply a powerpoint presentation with numbers, and stats and percentages and not enough about people enjoying the music.

i used to love going to gigs when i was living in hong kong, didn't find many interesting gigs over here after i moved to auckland 2 years ago. maybe yeah coverage of local gigs is exactly what we need - but seems like the platform is only for DJs. you cited The Beths and general industry decline, then built a platform that's explicitly electronic-only, which falls a bit short

> And yet local artists captured as little as 9 percent of New Zealand streaming, download and physical sales revenue in 2024. In the official end-of-year Top 50 singles chart, exactly one New Zealand track appeared. Radio plays local music, but only two nationwide commercial stations exceeded 20 percent local content.

This seems amazingly high for local content in a small English speaking market, unless that's all just Crowded House.

As a New Zealand musician I'd never heard of this, so I got excited for a moment but I see it's only for Electronic music artists, which isn't me. I'm glad someone's trying though.

In 2012 and for a while after, NZ had a government-run website called "The Audience" where any musician could sign up and they'd track listens etc, and the top artists would get actual sponsorship. That was a quite cool idea. The URL is still there with the old logo but it's no longer the same thing.

I really wish it was easier for artists of all types to be seen if their work resonates, regardless of their audience or marketing budget or why they know. I also realise it's kind of an impossible dream; even a perfect analysis algorithm would only shift the power to its creator. Valve seems to be trying quite uniquely hard to do a good job with Steam's discovery system and I appreciate them a lot for that.

Neil, Tim and Lorde need to get together, put on a gig at the basin, live aid style and save nz muso journalism!

AI slop article about an extremely niche industry in an irrelevant country? I’ll pass.

What part of this is ostensibly intellectually stimulating because it seems like transparent marketing to me, and poor marketing at that. We don’t need posts for every GoFundMe currently in existence. NZ doesn’t have the population to support something so nice, it’s really that simple lol.

“Put those two facts together and you get the real story. The scene is alive and economically significant, but it has lost its mirror. There is no one left whose job is to tell you what happened at the show last night, which local producer just signed to an overseas label, or why a 34-year-old venue went under owing $692,000.”

As they say, ‘and nothing of value was lost.’

Sadly, the AI writing is so terribly distracting.

So the long and short of it seems to be an advertisement for the site itself?

I think this should've been a show HN as your affiliation with the site is not obvious from the outset.

Good luck with your project, but I suspect it will take more than a Claude subscription and a dream to replace what the article claims has been lost.

> Propel has published more than 225 articles

Open topic is if anyone is reading those or not.

But decline of quality press & local press is a very big problem.

On another board there is a person who (for free) collects information about people who lost their lives in car accidents during every summer vacation. That person tries to link to articles that described what happened. More and more, there are simply no articles -> because there is no more local press, even a local portal that would write about it.

In a way it's on the people - who dont want to pay for content. Perhaps due to some content shifted to youtube, tiktok or facebook.

I couldn't be more enthusiastic about the local music scene here. But that doesn't mean I'm going to read AI slop about it. If you want to promote the arts, start by using your own words.

Seems to have a very narrow focus in terms of variety of music covered