Musicadium Blog

PRESSPLAY MEDIA

Pressplay Media (a Music Marketing company – sync music licensing & print media) and Dreadlock Cowboy (an Australian Independent Artist) are doing something very special together. They have released “Sweet Days” for placement into an Australian Film, Australian Television program OR an Australian Commercial for FREE!

This offer is extended to Pressplay Media’s Australian registered Music Users and will be active until 31st May 2009.

To register log on to www.pressplay.com.au and fill out the free registration form. You must be a Music User to fill the form out. Once registered you can start searching for music or apply to license “Sweet Days” for FREE.

No, they are not crazy! Both Pressplay Media and Dreadlock Cowboy are of the same opinion about getting out and being noticed. This deal is win/win/win. Pressplay Media wins. Dreadlock Cowboy wins. Music User wins. Exposure and Promotion is the name of the game!

Dreadlock Cowboy is a singer/songwriter who also plays acoustic guitar and stomp box and has been described as folk/rock fairy/pop! She has been writing music for over six years, is proudly Australian and has a broad fan base. Her highlight this year (so far) was playing at the same gig as Deni Hines and Christine Anu. Oh, and she just happens to be the little sister of the Director at Pressplay Media!

If you are an Independent Artist or Band you can also register as a Music Owner. Log onto the web site and decide if you would like Pressplay Media representing you for placement of your music.

For all enquiries about this offer or licensing information please email music@pressplay.com.au

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‘Breakthrough’ grants offer Indigenous musicians exposure from (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/30/2530391.htm)

It seems it is extremely rare for an Indigenous musician to reach the top of the charts.

In recent years, very few have been able to reach the heights of artists like Yothu Yindi or Christine Anu.

But now the Federal Government is offering three grants of $25,000 to young Indigenous musicians, to try to find the next generation of stars.

Music, like other art forms, is often at its best when it tells a story or expresses an idea.

For contemporary Indigenous music, those stories are often about culture, past and present.

Wire MC has been rapping about Indigenous issues for years but has always struggled to get any commercial success with his music.

“Being a young Indigenous rapper, man, there’s already a couple of strikes against me; I’m black and I rap,” he said.

“This country really is white boy rock’n'roll, that’s another struggle that I come up across. You know me, I love rock’n'roll, so somehow I try to find a way around these obstacles.”

But that is not the only obstacle. He sees one of the biggest problems as mainstream audiences not being aware of contemporary Indigenous music.

“You have to be persistently driving yourself to work. You know what I mean?” he said.

“Like, when there’s no funding, there’s just you and your art, pretty much there’s no resources, other than community centre studios and things like that.”

And that is why the Federal Government is launching a new pilot program called ‘Breakthrough’ to give Indigenous artists those resources.

It is offering three grants of $25,000, to be used to break into the commercial music industry.

Arts Minister Peter Garrett says it would be used to record an album and promote it.

“Any new musician when they’re coming through in their early stages is competing with others,” he said.

“It means competing with people whose music gets played on radio here when they have recording budgets and marketing budgets, and production budgets that far exceed anything that any Australian musician could contemplate.”

The money will be available for artists who have been trying for years to crack the big time, or for younger singer/songwriters, who show potential.

“Whenever I’m travelling around the country, I’m really struck when I visit Indigenous communities at how much music is actually coming out of bedrooms and houses and from the back of sheds and other places,” said Mr Garrett.

“You know there’s that vitality and that productivity there which is just absolutely staggering. And anything that we can do to lift a little bit of that up and give it a bit more of a profile, is a good thing.”

At the Gadagil recording studios in the Sydney suburb of Redfern is a new set-up for Indigenous musicians to create their work.

The studios have only been there for a few months, but this weekend Gadagil will be releasing a hip hop album, created by young Indigenous artists.

The studio’s manager Brad Cooke says it is a popular genre.

“It is the emerging style. Whenever we go out with our young black and deadly performance projects into communities and teach kids how to sing, dance and write songs, most of the time it’s about hip hop music,” he said.

Any of the artists on the album would be able to use the money from the government’s ‘Breakthrough’ program.

Mr Cooke believes the most important part about it, if Indigenous music really is to make it into the mainstream charts in the future, is the money for promotion.

“The real need to highlight the money is for publicity and for the promotion - the marketing and push behind it so commercial networks do play it” he said.

“A lot of people out there listening now would know that some really bad artists have become successful on the back of good solid marketing promotion and because they might look good.

“We think our music’s got more substance than any of the music out there. We’d love for people to hear our stories and we now have a really good opportunity to do that and hopefully our artists will get to utilise the new breakthrough initiative to do that.”

Based on a report by Michael Turtle for PM

Musicadium is once again on board with Queensland, Australia’s most significant Music Awards.

Musicadium sponsored the New and Experimental Category in 2008, with Brisbane’s Lawrence English taking out the honours and is sponsoring the same category this year. 

From their Website:
The statewide search is on again in 2009, to uncover Queensland ’s best and most innovative songwriters during the 4th annual Q Song Awards 2009.
The Q Song Awards will be even more special in 2009 as it is also an official event on the Q150 program, celebrating Queensland’s 150th birthday.

So put these key dates in your diary and get working on those new songs ideas now!

• Entries open on  Monday March 30, 2009
• Deadline for entries is Friday May 15, 2009
• Finalists announced in June 2009
• Winners will be announced at the Q Song Awards Ceremony on Tuesday August 11, 2009 to be held at The Tivoli, Fortitude Valley .

Entry forms will be available online via the Q Song website from Monday March 30, 2009

This week, it’s Seth Sentry’s AWESOME oz hip-hop song, The Waitress Song that we are loving.  It has been added to Triple J’s high rotation list and has been getting numerous plays and LOADS of requests.

We love the laid-back vibe of the song and the tale of unrequited love for a waitress at a Cafe that serves sub-par food and past-their-read-by date newspapers.

From his MySpace page:

Introduced to the live circuit in 2003 through performances with local hip hop/drum and bass outfit D.S.O.L, Seth quickly became a fixture at Elf Tranzporter’s seminal ‘Phat Logic’ night from 2003-‘05, where he honed a freestyle technique that ultimately gained him local prominence through a third placing in the 2005 Revolver Battles competition.

By this time he also organized and kicked off the successful weekly ‘Sideshow Freaks’ night at The Old Colonial in Fitzroy. Featuring a weekly line up of emcees and acts from around Australia, it was here he met and began a working relationship with talented hip hop producer Matik and Melbourne emcee Pez, leading to an appearance on ‘Lazy’ from the Forthwrite Mixtape (2007) and a guest feature on Pez’s hit album A Mind Of My Own (2008).

Truly independent and self-funded, Seth scribbled down rhymes for many of the tracks comprising The Waiter Minute on docket pads and serviettes during breaks between food and beverage orders at his day job at local restaurants.

Seth Sentry creates energetic songs with complex, unpredictable and challenging lyrics, held together with a strong narrative flow; a clear but sophisticated story emerges from each song on The Waiter Minute, while Matik’s top-shelf production skills make each song coherent and accessible.

Seth’s stark, sophisticated narratives often confront controversial and deeply personal themes, yet the emcee’s mature but quirky sense of humour is always in evidence.

We love this track and we love Seth Sentry!! If you like this track, you can purchase it on or add him on MySpace or become a fan on Facebook!

Last thursday night, in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, an electro storm brewed. The results: Bar Soma was rocked by Musicadium artists Foxx on Fire and The Cityscape riot and soon-to-be Musicadium artists Spider8!

Spider8 were first on the bill for the evening - an early technical glitch in the set was quickly overcome and Seal, Cam and Justyn went on to rock 6 of their bangin’ tunes, interspersed and beatmatched with fantastic tracks by the Presets, Daft Punk and Mr Oizo. Numerous fans in the crowd were spotted wearing shirts that said - “SUPREME LISTENING - SPIDER8 IS HERE TO AUDIO”.  Nice! Check them out on MySpace and Facebook.

Joseph from the CityScape Riot was going solo last night, his drummer unable to play - but he rocked out by himself, drawing comparisons to Cut Copy. It was amazing to see one person making so many different noises and sounds! Check out The Cityscape Riot on MySpace, Facebook and

Then, on came the headliner, the main attraction for the evening, Foxx on Fire.  The crowd moved on the stage and suddenly, the entire dancefloor was filled with moving bodies!  Foxx on Fire belted out tracks such as Polizia & No Love in the City and finished with our favourite, Mission Abort. Thank you Paul, Geno, James and Eddie for making the trip up from Melbourne.  We loved having you!!  Check out Foxx on Fire on MySpace, Facebook and on

This week, Falling in Autumn’s cover art for their EP ‘Tree’ is our favourite cover art.

From their MySpace:

Falling in Autumn is a Sydney-based group which revolves around the cathartic folk songs of Carissa Lehmann and Simon Williams.

Meeting through a mutual friend, the group’s dual songwriters found in each other a musical partner in whom to confide their acoustic confessions.

The pair have spent the past year quietly writing on a backbone of ‘love, loss and the unknown’, honing their sound and the songs which would become their recently self-released Tree EP.

Along their journey, they attracted the amazingly talented Jo Brooke - a beautiful, articulate cellist and vocalist; and Aussie pro bodyboarder Ewan Donnachie on percussion.

Falling in Autumn have crafted a lush, ambient sound; spawned from both a love of classic folk artists as well as their respective surroundings in the Blue Mountains and Northern Beaches. They have drawn comparisons with acts such as George and Angus & Julia Stone and continue to convert new fans with their warm, honest songwriting.

2009 is set to be a big year for the group as they expand their horizons interstate and plan to write and record their next release.

For management or booking enquiries, please email fallinginautumn@hotmail.com

If you like Falling in Autumn’s music, check them out on

This week we LOOOOVE Blame Ringo’s video clip for their song Garble Arch.  So do a lot of people, it seems - it was featured on Youtube, alongside Yves Klein Blue’s Polka filmclip. It features a day in the life of Abbey Road and THAT road crossing! Leave a comment here!

It’s only one day away till our fantastic Musicadium Electro showcase at Brisbane’s BarSoma!

We have two more dates booked in at BarSoma for now, (with most definitely more to come after that!) so we are on the hunt for artists to play at our future showcases!

The next two showcases are on Thursday nights as well - May 21st and 23rd July 2009.

If you would like to be considered for these showcase nights in the future, (remembering that we try to theme our showcases, so it may be subject to appropriateness for the night!).  We will keep a database of artists who are interested in playing, so register your interest for the future!  We cannot promise a gig to you, but we will definitely put you in our ‘interested’ database, which puts you on deck for sure!

Send an email with the subject line “We want to play at a Musicadium showcase!” to info@musicadium.com along with a bio to be considered for future gigs.

Reading through the oceans of music industry blogs and through forests of tweets everyday about the music industry (read: across the board - live, distribution, marketing, online, merchandise, royalties etc), you’d be forgiven for being confused.

Now, it seems this way to me.  I could be wrong, but I am exposed to a lot of writers’ opinions on the internet, so I feel I have read a lot of these blog posts/tweets and have seen a trend here.

There are two parties/factions - those who believe that the sky is falling and those who believe that the sky is the limit.

I found these words in an article at Techdirt about Rhodri Marsden saying that there is no new business model for the music industry to adopt and that none of them work. Mike Masnick wrote this:

Every single aspect of the business is way up — except for the part that’s about selling plastic discs. The plastic discs with music on them business is in decline, but that’s not “the music business.”

It seems to me that the two factions could be split up in the following way as well.  Sky is falling = old school music industry thought vs Sky is the limit = new school/digital/web 2.0 thought/business model.

Now, you might say that this is a very simplistic way of thinking about the whole system, but the divide really does seem to sit there.

The biggest example of this is the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger in the United States.  The entire merger is currently being debated in the US senate, due to the fact that the company (and it’s subsidiary re-sellers) will effectively create a monopoly on the concert ticket market and drive ticket sales up, in a time of financial hardship.  This ticketing system only benefits large-scale acts whose stadium gigs’ tickets are hot commodities and will be re-sold.  Through Ticketmaster’s secondary companies.  At higher prices.  I saw an article recently that was basically about how house shows are becoming a much more viable option for independent and smaller touring artists.  These shows are great, but in today’s industry, when an artist can self-promote, can manage themselves, can self-record, why can they not book shows at quality venues and ticket them through a reputable company without someone exploiting that to the nth degree through practices like re-selling and increasing prices (and artists not seeing a cent of the increased price)?

And then, have artists come on board and sing their praises after Bruce Springsteen criticises them?  The artists all rushing to the “aid” of the company are all agents of the old school too.  Artists who have failed to disclose that they have relationships/interests in the company.  Artists who have seen commercial success during the CD/MTV era (read: the 80’s and 90’s).  From HypeBot:

Eddie Van Halen, Seal, Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins and the four members of the band Journey  have signed individual letters supporting the merger. Each is managed or co-managed by Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff and his Front Line Management. Azoff is also slated to hold one of the top three positions in the new merged company.

This type of large company, major labels, management houses and organisations are all now the ones who are crying foul at the fact that their CD sales are drying up and their profit margins are dwindling.  These are the sky is falling people.

The web 2.0 people are the sky is the limit people.  They are the hunters, the ones who are the early adopters of new technology, the ones who take up on the new opportunities as they come up.

After coming back from a coffee meeting with Dave Carter, a Lecturer in Music Technology from Griffith University this afternoon, I am reminded moreso of the divide between these sky is falling people and the sky is the limit people.

Dave’s experience is from his travel and works within the music sector all over the world.  Just listening to him talk about the way that different countries approach the piracy/distribution/mediums was fascinating.  Definitely a case of a Sky is the limit person.

We believe that the music industry is booming.  There is so much room for improvement, but it’s certainly not the picture of doom and gloom stated by some.  Let’s get on with finding ways of benefitting everyone!

Well, this just about completes the circle.  This post really will seem like an advertisement for the iPhone, but the product really is blowing my mind and what people the world over are able to do with them. Although iPhones have been around for quite a while now and apps for the iPhone as well, I have come to the conclusion that Apple really has created something that Musicians can use to promote themselves and now also to actually play their gigs as well.

I found this video from a link on Hypebot - an indie band called The Mentalists - 4 girls, play a cover of MGMT’s Kids using four apps purchased from the iPhone app store.

It seems as though it really will not be long before we see complete original “iPhone bands” using iPhones as synths, drum loop machines and wind instruments as seen in the clip.

So now, we see a tool that is able to be a part of the on and off stage world of a musician/artist.  A mobile device that can play and record music, as well as be a promotion tool.

In terms of promotion for a band, the iPhone is a one-stop shop too. Apart from being able to text your friends to let them know about your gigs, you can access all of your social networks - including twitter, facebook, myspace and more or you can also film your practices or gigs and upload them to youtube on the spot.

On the other end of the spectrum, bands such as The Presidents of the USA and Death Cab for Cutie have embraced the iPhone app and developed applications for fans to hear their entire catalogue, or find out gig info or to discover new music/watch video.

Obviously, it’s not within every band’s reach to develop iPhone apps for their band, but this interesting article on MediaFuturist about software being the next music medium seems to think that bands offering their entire catalogue as an application or as software for mobile devices is the way of the future.

From the MediaFuturist blog:

This is clearly a very cool idea, and something I have been looking at for quite some time: in the dawning age of rapidly exploding mobile app stores, on 5+ platforms, and with something like 2 Billion always-on smart phone users, we can now start selling music as software packages, i.e. in any UI/UX, multimedia, online/offline format that fits the artists’ specific users and locations. Bands and artists, their managers, agents or labels and even publishers can select any combination of audio, video, pictures, texts, news feeds, games, twitter updates and social media ‘rivers’ to update the bands fans at any time, anywhere in the world.

Is the iPhone the ultimate in artist tools, can it help your band on and off stage?  Comment here with your thoughts.  Where to from here?  Do you REALLY want to see iPhone only bands - cool or corny?

I can understand he’s upset about The Cure’s not so popular album release of 4:13 Dream last year but he shouldn’t be rubbishing the model of one of the (rare) successful online record launches we’ve seen.

As we all know, Radiohead stuck it to the man in 2007 with their release of “In Rainbows”. They let us decide just how much money we thought their music was worth.

Releasing the album in digital format through their website, customers could pay what they wanted or nothing at all. The site only advised, “It’s up to you.”  This didn’t dampen the value of the music. Rather, it made us think.  It gave us the power to either do the right thing by them, or by ourselves.

In an interview with Music Radar on Tuesday February 24th Smith was quoted:

“The Radiohead experiment of paying what you want - I disagreed violently with that. The idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan. You can’t allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don’t consider what you do to have any value at all and that’s nonsense. If I put a value on my music and no one’s prepared to pay that, then more fool me, but the idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan, it can’t work.”

Justifiably, recorded music has traditionally been distributed successfully by way of a physical medium; today however, sales of compact disc recordings are down. Nevertheless, consumption of music is well and truly up, festivals and club shows are selling out across Australia in a matter of minutes, and there has been an explosion of new bands, artists, genres and songs. iTunes has recently surpassed Wal-Mart as the number one music retailer in the United States and digital music now accounts for 20% of all recorded music sales, up from 15% in 2007.

Trying to back pedal after receiving bad press for his Radiohead bashing he wrote (in caps lock) a blog posted February 28th on The Cure’s website:

“ANY FAMOUS ARTIST WITH A HUGE AND DEVOTED FAN BASE (OFTEN ARRIVED AT WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM A WEALTHY AND POWERFUL ‘PATRON’ OR TWO?) CAN AFFORD TO DO WHAT HE, SHE OR IT WANTS…
INCLUDING GIVING THEIR ART AWAY AS SOME KIND OF ‘LOSSLEADER’ TO HELP ‘BUILD THE BRAND”

Despite Radiohead’s risky strategy, The Album went to #1 in the UK and the US when released physically on CD/vinyl in early 2008.  The Cure’s 4:13 Dream however peaked at #33 in the UK and # 16 in the US.

Nine Inch Nails and Bad Religion are two of many other bands who are also trying to find another revenue stream other than physical sales trying to add value to ‘the unit.’  This includes additional incentives like photos, posters, additional tracks, and other motivations to sell a “deluxe edition” of the CD or vinyl.

At the moment there is still a place for physical sales, although we can’t cling to an outdated industry model that clearly doesn’t work in the digital age. When a consumer offers a price in Radiohead’s model, they are giving a value to that artists work.  By being given the option people are more likely to assess and pay what they think is fair rather than download illegally from torrents and the like.

The music industry is far from dead: the traditional model sadly is.  Fans are willing to spend money on buying music, but the last few decades have changed the medium in which this is done.  For bands to remain both accessible and relevant to fans there is no questioning the fact that music needs to be available online in some form.

“If I put a value on my music and no one’s prepared to pay that, then more fool me”

Perhaps Smith needs to realise its just hard to put a value on anything post “Bloodflowers”.