simpletune

Thanks m+n! Oh lordy, which indie store to give some love to... !

henderson - thanks for the numbers on the royalties paid by the ABC. Wow, how does that work! It'd be interesting to know details of the ABC's arrangement with APRA ..and how many Unearthed artists are APRA members. Anyone noticed a difference in their royalty cheque after being played on triple j?

ghoti-max - it's cheezels ftw. They're designed to make it perfectly acceptable and not at all greedy to eat lots of them - you absolutely have to eat one off each finger, you see. Preferably after having made jazz hands at someone with your yellow-stained cheesy ringed fingers. Mum was wrong when she said you shouldn't play with your food.

Yes.

What makes good radio? For it seems to me that Unearthed radio is not that. It is not curated into programs – at least, I haven’t noticed if it is! It does have brief, pre-recorded interviews with band interspersed between tracks. Add in a few carts and maybe the occasion special occasion broadcast, and that’s about it. I am still tuning over now and then, but without presenters, without any apparent human input into the order of the playlists, and without much context, as a casual listener I find it hard to stay engaged with the content for longer than a couple of tracks. However, even that way I might find my New Favourite Band. The choosing of which acts are interviewed and the guidelines for what can and cannot be broadcast / made available on the site are not made known. Each and every song submitted to the site gets listened to, in roughly a two week turn-around period. You can only have 3 songs ‘live’ on the site at any one time. Songs with possibly offensive language get marked with an ‘M’ icon for mature content on the website. How many times do you have to swear to earn that? Do they catch every song? Do they listen to the whole song? triple j only knows. When you sign up as an artist you agree to their terms and conditions- a legal document. I doubt they have the resources to check every artist is what they say they are. Do they check this before they feature an artist? How much effort do they go to? What counts as a ‘signed artist’? When an artist gets signed after having created an Unearthed profile, does anyone take it down? Do they keep playing a track on Unearthed radio even after the band has pulled it down from their Unearthed profile? Do we, as listeners and artists and promoters and labels, even want triple j to check these things – if a song is good, it should get heard, right?

''13. You acknowledge that the ABC will allow users to listen to, reproduce, download and otherwise deal in the copyrights attached to and embodied in the Material. The ABC aims to ensure that use of the Material not authorised by the ABC will not occur, however you acknowledge that the ABC is not equipped with mechanisms to prevent unauthorised use of the Material, and you accept that, to the extent allowable under the law, the ABC has no liability to you for how the end user elects to use the Material, and as such it may be permanently stored, reproduced, copied, distributed or the like, without recourse or remedy against the ABC.'' How does the legal agreement with the ABC regarding material uploaded to Unearthed impact on other agreements artists have with other organisations?

So if it is not good radio, what is it for? The Unearthed website is a repository of music. If we are lucky, that music is Australian, and unsigned, and provided by the people who hold the copyrights for it. It is provided freely. triple j, as with any radio station, has been given free music for a long time, especially through its Unearthed projects. Rather than cassettes and photocopied press releases, music is submitted in a format that makes it easy for triple j to make that data available to everyone with an internet connection, and via Unearthed radio, to anyone with a digital radio – let’s imagine that’ll be a lot more people as time goes on. It’s your government funded station and they’re sharing what they’re given, after some light handed sifting.

*triple j has a lot of reach, yes, but what are their resources like? How many staff are there at triple j, for music, for technology? Why does their app not work smoothly? Who does their illustrations? Can they honestly cope with the amount of good and awful music that gets submitted to Unearthed? With more resources, what could Unearthed evolve into- besides competition against their own main station? *

Will triple j’s main station only play the acts that come to them through Unearthed?

Maybe? Will those acts still need A&R reps, publicists, small label owners? Yes. Especially if they’re good at their work! Oh, and community radio. (Are there acts on Unearthed that are already attached to small labels? Yes.) I think Unearthed is merely part of the campaign. Unearthed radio is a super simple way for casual listeners as well as music nerds to discover new music, another option on the digital dial which I'm already wishing I could sort into folders. You still have to have something more ready for them to grab onto after that initial listen. It is a tool, dear industry; don’t fear to put it to good use.

Btw, triple j, I’d love a job. :D

triple j, let's see - main station, broadcasting into regional areas across 5 time zones (hello Christmas and Cocos (Keeling) Islands) and that's just on the FM band. Add into that the coverage gained via the internet. (For triple j's main station, digital radio broadcasting does not yet cover areas that aren't already covered by FM/internet). That's a powerful thing to have supporting Australian music, I think. It provides a common link and a display platform for our culture, that caters to young people, across a wide distance and scattered population. At least, that's the challenge it faces. And who else is going to take that on? To make it possible for a kid from Fitzroy Crossing to request a Striborg song and do a shout out to a friend in Yuendumu that I can tune into while down the beach in Port Fairy? I love the possibility of it. Yes, they're a monopoly; there is no-one else both willing and able to compete with them on the scale required to challenge that.

Is triple j unearthed another peg in the national broadcaster’s market monopoly?

triple j Unearthed does not have that kind of coverage, yet. ABC digital radio stations currently only broadcast to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, and within those areas, how many digital radios are in cars and houses and portable devices? (If a station broadcasts on a frequency no-one can pick up does it make a sound?) How much listening gets done online? The latest report I have found (please feel free to point me to others), that goes some way to giving us an idea of how much impact these non-analogue broadcasts have, is from March 2011 using 2010 data : Share of Listening Platform- 97.2% analogue, 1.6% DAB+ digital radio, 1.2% internet radio. (I would like to know more about their methods for finding those figures; I expected internet radio to be higher due to personal bias based, unsurprisingly, on my own listening habits.) Break those figures down further into listening by age groups (18-25 the nominally important range when talking about triple j) and time spent listening (7h 38m / week), and then, though we don't have this data: how much time spent listening to triple j Unearthed in particular.

And that last point reminds me what makes discussing Unearthed & Unearthed radio so difficult. We have so little insight into its workings. The digital radio station was effectively trialled in Nov (Oz Music Month) in 2010. I can only tell you about my own experiences. As an online listener, it had some teething problems, basic things; the stream would cut out, the 'currently playing' data would not update, and when I had some back and forward correspondence with triple j staff in regards to the digital station, they were friendly and helpful in their communications - yet those communications were irregular. The project seemed to be given only cursory treatment; the impression I had was one of an understaffed and overworked office.

There's a question: Who do you go to if triple j staff do not act on their word? As a government funded station, who are they answerable to?

Between that month and the launch of Unearthed radio, triple j hired some more staff for their Unearthed team. And I got a digital radio.

i had quite honestly never even heard of neon trees til right now

+1

TLE FTW

Perthfest is lookin' hot! Interested in checking out The Sway Machinery (Jeremiah Lockwood of Balkan Beat Box, Brian Chase of Yeah Yeah Yeah's, Colin Stetson of Arcade Fire and Jordan Mclean and Stuart Bogie of Antibalas)

... that's two members of Yeah Yeah Yeah's in the country at the same time ... O.O

PJ and Beth Orton already had non-festival shows announced over west so that's cool. Bon Iver playing Perth in Perth will be grand too!

Only thing missing is a tune-yards show :)

Paging Tim Freedman...

Dear Aunty, For your next doco - a fly on the wall style behind the scenes over a year of putting together and putting on the festival - please can I film it? Title will be ''Who Is The Real Aunty Meredith''

but not a big night, just so everyone can get in early, set up and cruise for a night. good idea or no?

Only if you make it an Open Mic Night. Or karaoke! I'm sure there's a lot of musically talented GP attendees..

Thanks for making my day Aunty. xo