Social Media Will Kill You: Ben Lee tries to make a fun Australian music countdown all about himself
Triple J's Hottest 100 is an easy target for its usual conservative critics at The Daily Mail and News.com.au.
Despite major ABC budget cuts making it almost impossible to run the station competitively, the ABC is routinely criticised by Australia's media for not doing enough to compete with billion and even trillion dollar streaming companies. And this criticism often comes from the same bad-faith local news sources that don't support Australian music at all, or even back ABC budget-cuts.
On the weekend Triple J ran a very successful Hottest 100 countdown of Australian Songs, with most votes coming from its young target demographic of 18-29 year olds. A huge 2.65 million+ people voted. And it genuinely was a celebration of all Australian music, with a mix of old and new songs and artists.
If you stayed offline and listened with friends and family it was genuinely a fun day of listening to local music from every era. The countdown itself was 10 hours of Australian classics served with context and commentary from passionate Triple J and Double J hosts and calls from voters. Triple J hyped up the countdown for weeks with a regular show that played Australian artists and celebrities own personal Top 10's. The PM even voted.
But in a time where controversy courts clicks, the reaction to the fun music poll is now always based around any negative angle the media can find.
Seriously, do a Google search for "Hottest 100" and any year number and you'll find a negative article from The Daily Mail and News.com.au, which will criticise anything the national broadcaster does. And for this one-off Australian poll Ben Lee was this years provider of ammunition against the station.
While Lee could have used his own platform to highlight great Australian music, or any Australian music for that matter, instead he used the Australian music countdown to blame Triple J for the local industries woes.
In an Instagram video he claimed that Triple J should limit its playlist to just Australian music. The result? Instead of Australia's media writing or interviewing any Australian artists, the outlets instead focused on Triple J's shortcomings and on Ben Lee himself. The Age claimed that Ben Lee had a "bold plan to save Aussie music". That plan was a bunch of articles about himself I guess.
If you pay attention to Triple J you can see it runs on a tight budget. Triple J's Breakfast and Drive shows can't even afford to have a podcast. And while the BBC will run BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend concert live on TV and iPlayer, the ABC couldn't even find enough coins in the couch cushions to show Triple J's One Night Stand concert on its network this year.
Yet Triple J still showcases Australian music in a way no commercial station can even claim to. The stations playlists usually consists of over 50% Australian music, while commercial stations only have to follow a 25% quota. Commercial stations also often cram Australian music into graveyard slots, with the huge stretch of 6am-midnight counting as primetime, according to Commercial Radio Australia's quotas. Triple J's Like A Version is internationally recognised, and Triple J supports countless Australian festivals and gigs year-round. Unearthed streams on the Triple J app and Digital Radio, showcasing independent music 24/7. And Home & Hosed, Triple J's nightly Australian music show, has been hosted by the incredibly talented and passionate Ash McGregor for the past few years, putting a huge spotlight on local acts.
With a bigger budget Triple J could be the ABC's sole Australian music brand. It could broadcast concerts live on ABC TV and expand the stations audience. The Triple J app could be adapted to compete with stations like Apple Music 1, with more genre-focused shows, video content and music playlists. And maybe Triple J could become a more On-Demand and less linear-focused brand. But that would require a bigger budget, not the kind slashed by successive Liberal Party Prime Minister's.
Netflix, Spotify, YouTube and even our commercial TV channels aren't about to give local artists exposure either. Yet you won't see any coverage about this from The Daily Mail, The Age or News Corp. And in reality, Australian music is in a tough spot almost entirely because of Big Tech and streaming media.
It's a clear systemic problem, in the same way that Netflix cancelling your favourite show in a shrinking entertainment industry points to broader issues in the US.
While Triple J allows listeners to submit songs to Triple J Unearthed for consideration, Spotify charges artists and labels for placement. Spotify and other streaming music services can't even afford to pay even a single cent-per-stream to Australian artists, even though Spotify's CEO can afford to invest over AU$1 billion into an AI military startup. And social media giants like Instagram and TikTok now have more algorithmic power than the national broadcaster.
As an Australian artist with limited royalty income you need to tour to make money, and touring itself is an investment that costs artists money. I highly recommend Mood Machine by Liz Pelly, an incredible book that reports on Spotify's impact on the music industry worldwide. It really highlights the pure scale of the issues the music industry faces, issues that our government could help solve, and the ways in which artists "just touring" to make ends meet isn't a solution.
And while Australian artists are being paid less than ever for their recorded work, Australia is also going through a cost-of-living crisis (or 'nightmare' as the ABC would call it). An Australian artist paying rent in Sydney would need to work a second or even third job to actually afford to live in the city. Spotify royalties for most small Australian artists won't cover a week of rent, which means we are living through a time where many potential Australian artists are forced to give up music and to work in other industries to survive.
Despite running a radio station 365 days of the year, a 1 day countdown of listener-voted songs usually draws most of the media's attention for the year. And while the same media could support local music, it usually focuses on the downsides of the countdown, instead of focusing on the fact that the countdown is still incredibly popular despite a decline in radio audiences across the world. Triple J for me feels like the one remaining bright-spot in Australian music, and while critics like Ben Lee might have good intentions, they are helping its demise. And nothing will take its place.
I think the frustrating thing is that more could be done to help Australian artists. The Australian Government should be held responsible for falling behind on modern legislation to tackle the issue. Radio quotas could quite easily be adapted to streaming services, and multinational, trillion-dollar services could be forced to highlight more Australian music. But that would require News.com.au, The Daily Mail and Ben Lee to actually want a real solution to the issues at hand.
Or Labor could follow through on putting Double J on the FM frequency, like it claimed it would look into back in 2022. Wonder where that $500,000 of "feasibility" research money went? Probably consultant friends.
I guess in Australia it's considered patriotic for our conservative media to complain about everything and anything. At least on Saturday I had a great time listening to Australian music. And would you look at that, Ben Lee's Cigarettes Will Kill You placed #83 in it. He didn't appear for an interview during the countdown.
