New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it
propelmusic.co.nz
propelmusic.co.nz
On the profitable social media bit. I have been a worker in the scene for 8 years, running events, promoting other people, pushing the scene. And i'll keep doing it here because I love it, not because theres money in it.
as someone involved with Free Software and Open Source, i can sympathize. the number of people who can get paid while at the same time doing it for the love of it is very small. i love to work on FOSS too, but i can't afford to do it without getting paid.
I love the older style layout, it is much more readable that 99% of websites available today. Also that Classified section is wonderful.
https://jon.luini.com/thelist/date.html
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.
Sometimes it feels like all we have is King Gizzard occasionally and then nothing but DJ's and cover bands to fill the gaps at the local RSL. Places like The Croxton still put on a great spread however.
It has been about 8 years since I was last in Wellington, it seemed to still have some stuff going for it but it was also clear that the decline was setting in.
I can't speak to what the scene was like 10 years ago, but to say that its rare feels very wrong to me.
Same as the 'modern music sucks' argument. Great modern music is there if you do the work, but if you're passive you'll only get the clones of what was popular (via payola) yesterday.
Flo had to go, I couldn't go with the flow
I suspect that people went out more in 2023-2025, but then they reversed to the mean + economic impacts (of money printing everywhere) hit.
* by the way, did covid officially ever end? the new variants seem to be still there, but it just stopped being covered by media after Russia invaded Ukraine)
Most everyone is vaccinated except the young who seem to have relatively mild infections. Of course there are probably excess cardiac deaths due to immune response, but that's even smaller and much more difficult to measure or determine cause for.
Nothing much to be done about those who refuse free education I guess. I also figure they just have less empathy for their families.
Miraculously, there were 0 flu deaths that year
I've always said I'm sure any politics university course must be based on the art of exaggeration. It's just what politicians do, so there's no way this one subject could be the sole one where they didn't. To make any point, they'll cherry-pick the least reliable studies, make examples of the outliers to imply they're the norm, use statistical obfuscation, etc. Graphs in the news were blatant - taking a line graph that was fluctuating up and down, and extrapolating by continuing the last tiny upward movement into a long straight line upwards, entirely ignoring the story the graph was really telling us.
Misclassifying at least some flu deaths as Covid (due to the way symptoms were diagnosed at speed by a single doctor each time, all need for checking removed) appears to have been one way the figures were at least slightly inflated.
It was clear throughout how politicians were determined to find the data to confirm the initial predictions.
Slight exaggeration is far removed from "hoax", but is still a bad thing for anyone who's like to know the real figures.
Take 50,000 out as flu deaths, and we still have 400,000 COVID deaths in a single year. This represents eight times the high-side average of flu deaths per year.
So whilst your comment may be true, it barely detracts from the destruction wrought by Covid, and justifies taking its threat seriously.
However due to other reasons people definitely have less money for discretionary activities, especially the youth.
And no, Covid never ended. It's still here, it's still killing and disabling people, but due to vaccines and antivirals it's less prevalent than it was.
Other countries had longer lockdowns or even when they didn't people were not going to concerts etc.
I had a stopover in Bangkok and _everyone_ was wearing masks. Not just Asian people, _everyone_. And that's when I was like "oh...this covid thing in the news is gonna be a bit bigger than we thought".
Then I land in the UK after that and all my friends & colleagues either haven't heard of covid or aren't really bothered by it ("it won't come here"). Was back at work for 2 weeks, then the first lockdown hit.
And we had lockdown, after lockdown, after lockdown. I would walk to the supermarket (the one thing we were allowed to do as per the rules) and be walking past parks filled with moron families socialising in the middle of lockdown.
The UK had so many long lockdowns because people here are quite selfish and cannot follow rules - and before people take offence - this is in contrast with NZ culture. There's much more "me me me" and "mine mine mine" culture here in the UK.
The international border quarantine was quite extreme, but the rest of the country was (mostly) business as normal.
As in, the most lethal variant of Covid.
But never mind that, it was bad for the local economy, right? You know what's worse? Excessive deaths due to Delta.
The strictness index (which is what I'm assuming you're referring to) varied over time as the response changed.
That ceased in Auckland, and was policed hard, it was very aggressive.
And the worst part of our 7 day lockdown? The first 3 months.
COVID never ended (we chose that). The pandemic turned to an endemic, which is a way of saying that the plan is now natural selection, as everyone will get infected (most people already have been). The death rates have somewhat reduced, but not to the extent that it's as harmless as the cold. Essentially it's now a particularly nastseasonal flu strain. If you're vaccinated, no you aren't, because COVID mutates as fast as any other flu and you last got vaccinated for it years ago.
It wasn't locked down for months on end while the rest of NZ was having fun in the sun, it was locked down the same as the rest of us initially, then it wasn't, then it was locked down again because a strain with a high lethality was present in the city. That strain was first detected in a rest home where it killed multiple elderly people.
The second lockdown wasn't for shits and giggles.
I really struggle to understand why Aucklanders don't understand this, and fixate on "We were locked down for months, unlike the rest of New Zealand, and it was really bad for our local economy" when the second lockdown was to save lives in Auckland and the lives of other Kiwis, because if it had spread from Auckland, there would have been plenty more dead Grandmas around the motu.
Sorry, did I type too fast or something?
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!
"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.
(My eyes are bent, my back is dim etc) I recall going to a few gigs back in the day. Iron Maiden headlining, with I think Anthrax. Wembley Arena (London, UK), 1989ish. That costed us £16 a head - I remember that price well, it was pretty cheap for the time. Guns n Roses, Wembley Stadium (the old one), 1990ish was about £25-30 - not too sure.
Beer at the time was crossing the £2 a pint mark in London. Seems my memory isn't too bad (1) bear in mind that London is a lot more expensive than the rest of the country.
Nowadays a pint in London will need at least a tenner and a gig in London will require waving a tearful farewell to a vital organ or a mortgage or both.
I doubt that general disposable income has risen five fold over the last 30 years.
Now, as to your assertion of "not being bored at home anymore". ... ... can't be arsed.
(1) https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/time...
New Zealand also has the disadvantage of being so far away that many international acts will skip it.
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 attended shows for the sheer love of music, the technical prowess on display, the emotional charge they gave. I found a lot of arena concerts to be annoying, because they were painfully loud, poorly mixed, and the crowd was full of knobs who smoked pot, chattered rudely, and just got in the way of a good time.
Conversely, I loved dancing at nightclubs and just hanging out all night in the music. There were people in the scene where you could just sit down, and have an adult intellectual conversation. So many kind and wonderful people to meet and form a clique with. The intimate concerts in small venues were very different and sometimes, transcendently beautiful. I will never regret some of those nights, just people-watching, rubbing elbows with beautiful women, and not really getting into a lot of trouble.
I've reverted to church and the weekly concerts now. When you're 50, the live-show crowd really isn't that into it anymore. Our bands are either playing massive arenas or at casinos! The ticket prices are exorbitant! I've tried to recapture the small-venue feel, but the new bands, and the obscure bands, I'm not in their Target Demographic, and I don't want to be the creepy old guy among a GenZ crowd with nothing to talk about.
It's weird, because sometimes if I peek back into the goth/industrial club scene, it seems to still be thriving, and my old chums have aged like me but they are still into it, because they can't let go. It wasn't a phase for them; it is a permanent identity and a lifestyle. I can't begrudge them that, but I feel like I outgrew it all.
This seems amazingly high for local content in a small English speaking market, unless that's all just Crowded House.
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.
If you've never been totally recommend. K Road in general is always so amazing (well, like >7 years ago).
The same is true everywhere else, big fish eats little fish.
Everywhere is becoming the same, where individualism and being unique is lost to the common.
Look at McDonalds, all the different burger shops around the world are getting replaced by the same McDonalds like burger chain. They might have a slightly different menu, but this difference is nothing compared to the old days.
Look at airports, they are all the same, its hard to identify which country any airport belongs too without cheating and reading signs. Shiny floor, columns, glass buildings.
Trains are another example, they all basically look the same, the same buttons to open the doors, the same basic platform layout. In the old days the Paris metro was quite different from London with its Metro signage and more, today they are the same.
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.
which leads to the next piece of the puzzle, “we lost our quality writers and what we’re doing to get it back.”
there are people who enjoy writing about their passions such as music scenes, tech, arts, maker scenes, etc,.. how do we put them together with the people who are passionate about building something for local music scenes? and no, i don’t think the answer is, “oooh, let’s build another app.”
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.’
There are certain parts of the world that really have little to no bearing on the rest of it. NZ is perhaps Exhibit A of this; Iceland is perhaps Exhibit B. Nothing that happens in NZ even affects AU, let alone anywhere else. That makes it a great place to live if you have the money and like the peace and solitude, but if NZ ceased to exist the rest of the world wouldn’t notice. Both Australia and NZ fail to recognise this often and both suffer from extreme FOMO on the world stage (Australia more than NZ, but Australia is also a much larger player internationally - what with ore exports etc).
This is an AI slop article about an extremely niche market that would struggle to support itself in even the world’s largest music markets, and it’s written as if New Zealanders have lost something valuable.
Nobody needs to know nor does anybody care which local music producers signed with which label, yeah? Like, that isn’t a news market that can support itself. Ditto for a news market that’s focussed on last night’s hipster band playing at the local grease hall. And if it wasn’t AI slop I’m sure an actual person from Wellington wouldn’t write it as if it was, which is half my point.
NZ’s economy is atrocious and crime and drugs and poverty and a massive brain drain over the past 10 years are huge problems and writing about them might be interesting if it were done by a person who actually did research and understood the problems. AI slop ain’t it.