New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it

There’s a guy in Wellington making a photocopied weekly gig guide which will do more for the local music scene than this attempt at making a profitable social media. I guarantee it.

http://www.theimage04.com

> Live performance revenue reached $329 million, well above pre-Covid levels.

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.

> And yet local artists captured as little as 9 percent of New Zealand streaming, download and physical sales revenue in 2024. In the official end-of-year Top 50 singles chart, exactly one New Zealand track appeared. Radio plays local music, but only two nationwide commercial stations exceeded 20 percent local content.

This seems amazingly high for local content in a small English speaking market, unless that's all just Crowded House.

Sadly, the AI writing is so terribly distracting.

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.

> Propel has published more than 225 articles

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 couldn't be more enthusiastic about the local music scene here. But that doesn't mean I'm going to read AI slop about it. If you want to promote the arts, start by using your own words.

Seems to have a very narrow focus in terms of variety of music covered