Tom Flood - Harmonica

Margaret River Acoustic Collective meets again for its popular Round Table jam tomorrow evening May 31 from 630-830 pm $5 at The Old Church, 33 Tunbridge Rd Community Centre. Bring yr instruments, yr voices, yr ears, yr friends, yr good cheer for a relaxed community of sound and song to see out the last hours of autumn.

https://theconversation.com/streaming-platforms-give-us-access-to-new-music-so-why-are-fewer-people-listening-to-it-278088?utm_medium

Streaming platforms give us access to new music, so why are fewer people listening to it? New research sheds light on a crisis facing new and emerging Australian artists.

Duckhouse sessions - sunday march 29th @ 4pm
Our sister concert monthly at Adamsons run by the MRACulous Nina & Monty/Matthew - with all local performers! $25 and I hope you'll support this listening gig.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1104946105104274/?acontext=

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Nathan Brenner - 'When it comes to supporting Australian content, our industry has lost its moral integrity. Shameful.
Let me spell out exactly what's happening while everyone pats themselves on the back for supporting local music. Australian artists' share of streaming has collapsed from 12 percent to just 8 percent between 2021 and 2024. That's a 31 percent drop in local content being streamed while the platforms and labels count their billions. We're talking about Australian artists losing out on US$40 million in earnings over just three years because the algorithms are rigged to favour American content. The streaming platforms have turned our market into a dumping ground for US catalogue, and nobody with any power seems to give a damn. Only 8 percent of the top 10,000 streamed artists in 2024 were Australian, while 56 percent were from the US. In our own country. On platforms Australians are paying for. The number of Australian acts in the top 10,000 most-streamed has shrunk from 932 to 773.
And yesterday's Triple J Hottest 100 result laid bare just how catastrophic this cultural colonisation has become. Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!" won with the most votes in Hottest 100 history. An American artist. Only 29 Australian songs made the entire countdown out of 100, down from 52 in 2023 and 57 in 2022. That's a 44 percent collapse in just two years. Charli XCX and Billie Eilish had eight tracks each in the countdown, while our highest Australian entry was Dom Dolla at number seven. The second place went to Royel Otis covering a British artist's song. This is the national youth broadcaster that claims to play over 50 percent Australian music each week, yet when 2.4 million Australians voted, they chose overwhelmingly to celebrate foreign artists. That tells you everything you need to know about how comprehensively we've been conditioned to ignore our own culture.
And where are the industry heavyweights in all this? Where are the CEOs of the major labels, the streaming platform executives, the commercial radio networks? They don't give a fudge. They're too busy cashing cheques from their foreign masters to care that Australian music is being systematically erased from Australian listening habits. They've drunk the Kool-Aid, been suborned by payments from foreign cultural pirates, and they're perfectly content to watch the market share of Australian artists collapse as long as their quarterly bonuses keep rolling in. Every single one of them has been bought off. The executives at Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music who operate in this country without a single regulatory obligation to support local content are laughing all the way to their offshore tax havens while extracting hundreds of millions in subscription revenue from Australian consumers.
The commercial radio networks are just as complicit. This week the Radio Monitor top ten had not one Australian song. The entire Hot 100 showed only 13 Australian tracks, with five getting zero metropolitan commercial radio spins. Kiis plays 14 percent Australian music, Nova just 12 percent, and they game the system by self-designating their format to drop quotas as low as 10 percent. But you'll never hear a word of complaint from the industry associations or the label heads who are supposed to be advocating for Australian artists. They're all in on it, happy to take their cut from the American catalogue that dominates the playlists.
And every press release, every industry talking head wheeled out to comment on these statistics, is just the most blatant hypocrisy. Triple J's head Macara had the audacity to claim the Hottest 100 results are "an opportunity to foster a broader discussion regarding support for Australian music". A discussion? We're past discussion. We're watching the complete annihilation of Australian music's presence in its own market, and all these people can offer is more talk. They'll trot out the same tired lines about "evolving music industry" and how "breaking through the algorithm is quite difficult", as if algorithms are some natural force rather than deliberately designed systems that could be regulated tomorrow if anyone had the spine to do it. These are the same people who'll stand on stage at awards nights and give speeches about the importance of Australian music while doing absolutely nothing to stop the streaming platforms from burying it.
The politicians are no better. Both sides of the major parties applaud this disaster because they're equally captured by the same multinational media companies. Labor and Liberal both know that streaming platforms have no local content obligations, no investment requirements, no accountability whatsoever, yet neither will touch it because they're terrified of upsetting the tech giants and the foreign labels that fund their campaigns and control their media coverage. They'll issue press releases about "supporting Australian culture" while Australian artists watch their streaming share collapse and their radio airplay evaporate. The hypocrisy is staggering. They'll mandate local content quotas for television that they then let streaming services ignore entirely, they'll talk about the importance of Australian stories while doing nothing as only five of the top 100 songs in the 2024 ARIA year-end chart were Australian.
This isn't market failure, it's moral failure enabled by an entire class of industry executives, label bosses, platform operators, state based music industry associations, the union, Managers associations and politicians who are either complicit or too gutless to fight back. The streaming services have no quotas, no accountability, and face no consequences for turning our market into an American cultural colony. Overall music consumption has grown 50 percent, yet streams of local music have stayed flat. APRA AMCOS revenue is up 6.5 percent, but that growth comes almost entirely from foreign repertoire. Every one of these statistics represents Australian artists being pushed further to the margins while the people who claim to represent them sit in their comfortable offices and do absolutely nothing. They've been bought, they've been suborned, and they simply don't give a fudge about anything except maintaining their positions and their payouts from the foreign corporations that are strip-mining Australian culture. Shameful doesn't even begin to cover the depths of this betrayal.'

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Margaret River Acoustic Collective. Sunday Dec 21 630-830pm Old Church, MR Community Centre. $5. Songs & tunes. Last until 2026. All welcome. 33 Tunbridge Rd

Margaret River Acoustic Collective (MRAC) Session Nights
Old Church, MR Community Centre, 33 Tunbridge St
This Sunday evening 23 November 2025 630-830pm
And every second Sunday.
Come join other players & singers & music lovers for a fortnightly session. Those who play and/or those who want to try new material or original work or a new instrument with a group of other musicians/singers. Donation $5 cash. Come along, meet others who write, sing and play, bring your instruments/voice/ears/good cheer. .
Bring your drinks, snacks and companions.
Queries: Tom 9758 8274
[email protected]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lidw_qH1D4Q

Bonnie Blue: James Cotton's Life in the Blues | Official Trailer Chesa Boudin’s journey from son of imprisoned Weather Underground activists to DA fighting to reform the justice system.Available on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandan...

Vale Garth Hudson, 87, keys and sax, last of The Band, contributor to The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Ringo Starr's All Star Band.

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