Read our submission to the NSW Government's Social Issues Committee on “The State Of Live Music” sydneymusic.net/reads/sydney...

Read our submission to the NSW Government's Social Issues Committee on “The State Of Live Music” sydneymusic.net/reads/sydney...

Interesting. Is the crowd turning against Harry Styles? That new song definitely isn't doing well

Love music and in Sydney? @sydneymusic.net is doing a survey to collect feedback on our gig guide, and what our city needs. We'd hugely appreciate your input. Takes 5 minutes: sydneymusic.net/survey

Always good when proof of stupid laws rushed through parliament occurs quickly

Love music and in Sydney? @sydneymusic.net is doing a survey to collect feedback on our gig guide, and what our city needs. We'd hugely appreciate your input. Takes 5 minutes: sydneymusic.net/survey

Pretty good, honestly. Thoughtful presentation, and you might as well go all in on slop if you're going to properly examine it.

I got Claude Code to write me a GUI “Hello World” app in assembly code and... well, I'll be damned

Talking about this (and some great gigs) on ABC Radio Sydney at 9:35

I find this extraordinarily depressing from the NSW government's report on the Night-Time Economy (NTE) Source: www.nsw.gov.au/business-and...

Here's where live music happened in Sydney in 2025 (source: SydneyMusic.net gig guide)

Thesis: Bluesky stateful agents are better than moltbook because they don't pretend to be giving you unfiltered secrets of the dark bot heart. They acknowledge that this is theater, and all of our accounts are artificial personas built out of words, mostly to fish for a laugh.

lol this is absolutely the wrong take, jesus christ

The Australian acts featured in the Hottest 100 have been active for a surprisingly high average # of years. I chatted about it a bit on ABC Radio Sydney last Saturday. In the 2010s the average number of years that the Aussie acts in the H100 had been active was 4-6 years. It's now 9-10 years.

Bums me out that we also don't get access to the benefits of solar power. While homeowners are bragging about their cheap power bills, landlords have no incentive to install panels on houses they don't live in.

I don't have time to get into this in detail, but here's my take on the Hottest 100 this year

“There are 250 local bands playing in Newtown tomorrow and none of them will appear in the Hottest 100 — maybe one" — me on ABC Radio this morning Any guesses on who the one act might be?

I was present for the birth of the web, the explosion of personal sites, and the blogging revolution, and you know what we never had to do? Beg people to use our shit.

Good, thoughtful piece on something that's getting a shitload of buzz at the moment. Super intrigued by the addiction to progress — people are doing stuff, but I'm not yet seeing much concrete evidence that it's effective. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/ag...

My fucking god I love Sydney band half request so much. RIYL: Slint, They Are Gutting A Body Of Water, Sebadoh, Slowdive, y'know — shoegaze-y slowcore-y stuff. Get amongst. Incredible live. halfrequest.bandcamp.com/album/sunmark

They really showed their hand when they introduced "re-roll" into the vocabulary last year e.g. "oh if the code that's generated doesn't work, you might need to re-roll a few more times with the same prompt" literally heard that on a YC podcast

Just got word of another community-run DIY space being shut down by council. Super frustrating. Australian music is already on the ropes and our best acts wouldn't exist without the support of a thriving DIY culture. We need to stop the demonisation of democratising how artists platform their work.

I can't shake the feeling that ATProto is the ideal mechanism to solve the problem of event listings (i.e. replace FB Events) • Venues or artists publish events • Events are aggregated by curators or a feed reader • Some kind of intelligence to deduplicate/consolidate repeated items Feels right?

This release of iOS is, no word of a lie, the first time I've seriously thought it might be time to drop Apple - entirely due to Liquid Glass. It's an abomination.

Been using Google Workspace for Nonprofits (free) for over three years, and I've never been upsold for additional services once. In the last 3 months I've been upsold a paid AI subscription at least 4 times, each time using language like this. Hate that many orgs will take this up. Exploitative.

Yo is all retail completely recessioncore this year? Dropped into Myer CBD and you'd barely know it was Xmas! Is this economic or social malaise? Zero festivity.

A long but hopefully interesting letter on how @sydneymusic.net is doing as we close out 2025 (Spoiler alert — we're funded until EOFY)

Wow it's almost like making a website designed to serve the needs and interests of your audience by being actually useful produces good outcomes!!

lol you know what doesn't have the juice? (Bluesky, it's Bluesky)

Boring old Web 1.0 websites have still got the juice!! @sydneymusic.net just keeps on growing

Just because you're doing the thing, doesn't mean the thing is being done

As with every week, I'll be on ABC Radio Sydney at 0935 AEDT to talk local gigs. It's a record breaking week for us in terms of show volume, so there's a lot to get through! Listen here: www.abc.net.au/listen/live/...

Not wanting to disappoint you so much that it lies is the last quality I want in a computer.

Sold out in 24 hours! Blown away by the response. Very excited.

RSVPs are 50% gone already

Record labels somewhat famously have never been in the morality business and somewhat more famously have always been in the “squeezing artists for profit until they burn out and die” business

SYDNEY. Very excited to announce our second discussion on the viability of grassroots music culture, hosted in collaboration with Offbeat Collective. No talks, no panels: just a full room discussion with whoever shows up. Spaces *very* limited. RSVP essential. events.humanitix.com/building-a-v...

Phenomenal piece

Speaking with Chris Taylor about QÄNTÄS DU SOL 😎 on ABC Sydney this morning

hey guys i made a seasonal meme

I swear to god, the amount of wasted productivity waiting for AI prompts to come back, there is absolutely no way this is helping us.

I've had a weird life. Over 30 years I've worked with, but never for, governments both in Australia and abroad, at both national and semi-sovereign levels of jurisdiction. The one thing I've learned from experience is that THE only good governments are ones that are willing to upset vested interests

As of 8:20am this morning, neither The Music or The Music Network had published anything about the ARIAs or the results, supposedly the biggest night in Australian music. Am I allowed to say we don't have a functioning music media yet or is it still too soon?

This is tomorrow!

Michael Burry, known for his $1B bets against Palantir & Nvidia, is reportedly closing his hedge fund. He claims market fundamentals are divorced from stock prices, blaming the AI bubble. I guess he's admitting the market can stay irrational longer than he can stay solvent.

Melbourne! I'm in your city next Tues to co-host a community discussion with local DIY producer and organiser Kuya Neil. We'll be exploring what makes a healthy grassroots music ecosystem, why things have gone a bit off the rails, and how to rebuild. Presented by @sydneymusic.net + Sound School

*blinking* ?????

Sydney's most comprehensive gig guide @sydneymusic.net needs your help to stay in the game! Our popular "Music In Every Corner" t-shirts and tote bags are getting another run and will be shipping soon. Pre-order yours today! store.sydneymusic.net

Here's the rate of increase for AI/LLM referrals to SydneyMusic.net this year. Shit's crazy. It's a real worry for website publishers. We estimate these figures reflect around 1-3% of queried on chatbots for (in our case) "what gigs are on in Sydney?"

The independent web needs and deserves your support. And sites like Stereogum inspire everyone.