Jagermeister Independent MusicAwards - Nick O'Byrne

Wed 29th Sep, 2010 in Features

As we head towards the end of the year it comes time to judge the finest Australian music of the year. Yesterday the nominees for the 2010 ARIA awards were revealed, but for awards with a more independent outlook there’s the Jagermeister Independent Music Awards

The nominations for the independent awards in 2010 are led by Cloud Control and Dan Sultan, with Parkway Drive, Dan Kelly, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, the late Rowland S Howard and many other independent artists also in the running to take home a gong.

The awards have been running for four years as the AIR Awards, but following a name change will now be known as the Jagermeister Independent Music Awards. Nick O’Byrne, the General Manager of the Australian Independent Record Labels Association, which runs the awards, explains that the name change is “Just for recognition, because it’s difficult to explain all the time what AIR is and what we stand for. These days it’s just more self-explanatory – these are awards for Australian independent music.”

While the name change certainly makes sense, some critics have noted that the branding attached to the awards is inconsistent with the independence of the awards. According to Mess+Noise’s Managing Editor Darren Levin “Saying ‘NOVA presents the Jagermeister Australian Independent Music Awards’ is kinda like saying ‘The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’. Just because you put a bunch of words together doesn’t mean they make any sense.”

However O’Byrne disagrees, noting that the awards aren’t supported by government grants and that inevitably the funding has to come from somewhere corporate. According to O’Byrne the awards aim to “help some independent artists make a good living out of playing music… one of the reasons we put on the awards is to give artists wider recognition and if that’s mainstream we don’t have a problem with that.”

Ahead of the awards presentation on Friday night, FasterLouder spoke to O’Byrne about the awards, the ‘controversial’ corporate sponsorship and his favourite nominees.

To open with a slightly devils advocate question what does the AIR awards offer that other awards such as the ARIAs, AMP, APRAs or J awards don’t?
I can go one by one – the j awards if you look at the nominees its purely from triple j’s play list and they’ve only got a 2 or 3% listenership Australia wide.

As far as the ARIA’s go there’s plenty of independent artists that would never get a look in because it is a mainstream awards. And we would argue that with the way they set it up the most popular artists often will win ahead of people that are achieving something artistically.

The AMP award is something I really love but it’s recognition by a small panel of judges for one album. And the APRAs is about song writing

We’ve been around for 5 years (we started just before the AMP) because there’s a space for it to recognise artists that don’t have a chance to be recognised in another way.

How do you define a band’s ‘independence’ for the awards?
It’s any music which is 100% Australian owned, which automatically discounts anything on a major label

Does that include distribution?
It’s to do with ownership of the masters, because you could argue a label like Liberation or Ivy League, which is distributed by Universal, has a relationship with its distributor no different to Boomtown or Rice Is Nice who are small labels with independent distribution. It’s just an economic necessity to have a distributor it just so happens that they have a major label one it doesn’t affect the way they do business.

Obviously there’s also the slightly controversial question about the independence of the awards themselves. Obviously there’s a need for funding to run the awards, and a debate about credibility vs exposure, but how did you make the decision to partner with Nova?
We’re pretty conscious of it, and it’s not just that it’s also our relationship with Jagermeister and also Channel V for that matter. They’re all companies who make money off brand placement and they’re commercial organisations, while we’re not. But I suppose in the end one of the reasons we put on the awards is to give artists wider recognition and if that’s mainstream we don’t have a problem with that.

We did a study earlier in the year where we looked at the playlist of every single commercial network in Australia and Nova was the only network which was always above [the others in terms of independent Australian content], which didn’t really surprise me (although I don’t listen to Nova).

We’re trying to get mainstream acceptance and help some independent artists make a good living out of playing music – which is the whole point of the organisaiton. So the relationship with Nova is quite a good thing, so we start here and use it to encourage them to play a lot more independent and Australian music.

It does seem like an odd fit. It would be rare to hear nominees such as Eddy Current or 50 Lions played on Nova.
50 Lions won’t get played on Nova unless they change their style of music. They’re never going to get played on Nova radio if they do I’d be very surprised, but Nova has a god web presence if they’re going to somehow use their media presence to push bands like that then that’s still a good thing.

We’re not forcing people to do what they might think of as selling out, we’re just saying ‘if you want, we can try to facilitate a relationship there’. Bands like Philadelphia Grand Jury get played quite a lot on Nova and that’s something that wouldn’t have happened 3 or 4 years ago. Hopefully that’s breaking the ice a little bit and slightly expanding the music taste and the playlist of the network.

Is the ‘Most Popular Independent Artist’ award aimed to an ‘icebreaker’ for Nova listeners?
All the artists nominated in the Most Popular category are playlisted on Nova to some extent. The award is about increasing awareness among Nova’s audience and giving Nova more reason to push the relationship as well if it means that every time these bands get played then they’ll be announced as independent bands and that you can vote for them I think that’s a good thing for the artist and the independent sector in general.

In addition to that new category, did you consider adding any other categories – best live act, best label, best blog etc?
We do throw those ideas around, but essentially AIR is a record labels association and we represent people who release music. Independent music is intrinsically linked to live music; so I’m not against a live music [award].

AIR is run on a tight budget with a relatively small staff that is quite engaged with the online community, which means that we do read blogs and FasterLouder, Mess+Noise, inthemix and stuff like that. I suppose we’d be open for [a best blog award] but it would have to fit; I don’t want to be doing awards for the sake of just doing awards. We did consider for a little while how to find a way to recognize those who are recognizing independent music, so the idea of best blog was something we threw around for a little while.

How you define the acts nominated in the ‘breakthrough’ category
They way we do it is that they have to make their debut in our charts in that year. Philly Jays and Bridezilla [two of this years ‘breakthrough’ nominations] both played at the awards last year but neither of them had actually released their full-length album at the time.

You’ve mentioned that one of the reasons to court funding from businesses is due to the lack of government funding for the awards. I take it the lack of government support is not through your lack of trying…
AIR fits into this funny category; if you’re an arts organization you can get funding and if you’re a business you can get funding and help. But we’re sort of in the middle. We’re an organization that looks after small businesses that have, hopefully, artistic outcomes. So we can’t go to the Australia Council for example, which is the main arts funding body in Australia. And we can’t get export grants and stuff like that from Austrade to try and facilitate our work in that way. So we’re left with not many funding options.

I think AIR does a lot of really good things for the independent sector, we negotiate and for example we did a deal on behalf of our members with MTV earlier in the year, we negotiate with MySpace, we talk to people overseas about doing deals with indies for YouTube and that s not in the capabilities for a small independent label.

All that costs money and we don’t make any money. I suppose it doesn’t just fit into the governments plan for thing they should fund; everything has to fit into the bigger scheme, which is about winning votes.

The awards are presented as part of the Melbourne Music Festival this year, so I assume there’s at least some council support. What does the relationship with the festival bring to the awards this year?
They’re a sponsor as well. Earlier in the year we had an approach from NSW to move it up there. We’re certainly not against doing that; we think it should move around. But it gave us an opportunity to speak the Melbourne City council and say ‘If you want the awards to keep the awards can you sponsor that?’ And the idea of the Melbourne Music festival… well it became something entirely different, but the germ of the idea came from us saying ‘Let’s have a week of independent music leading up to it, let’s do a gig at Fed Square, let’s do a bunch of interviews and lectures and interesting stuff for people culminating in the awards’.

What we’ve ended up doing is just the day after the awards we’ve now got a gig at Federation Square, we’re presenting along with the city of Melbourne, which is British India, Dan Kelly, Dan Sultan, Eagle and the Worm, Parades and Purple Sneakers DJs. Just a free gig at Federation Square, which is not part of the awards but just an independent gig for all the people.

Who decides the short list of nominees?
The way it works is that anything that appears on the independent charts throughout the year is automatically in contention to be nominated. We also go out to all our label members – about 150 – we send out to them and say ‘these are your albums and releases that have made the charts this year they’re in contention for the awards, if you want to put something else forward let us know’ so that’s how we get the short list that we present to our judges – there are about 250 judges and those judges come from music media, mainstream press but also online street press, bloggers and we also go to radio – again we try to get all sectors of radio community radio and ABC and commercial radio judges as well. And out to industry people working in the independent sector

Obviously you can’t give away any of the winners, but do you have any favourites in the awards?
I love Richard in Your Mind and Otouto in the breakthrough category, because I also love the record labels that they’re release through. I love Dan Kelly’s album because it’s funny without being a novelty album.

From the other categories I’m really pumped that we’ve got the Amity Affliction to play at the awards, that’s really quite exciting for us, because that’s something that another awards show couldn’t do. It’s like a representation of what’s actually happening in live music. Having a hardcore band, or something approaching a hardcore band, at a show like this is some sort of recognition that in a year where Amity Affliction and Parkway Drive have smashed the ARIA charts, let alone our charts, that is a really big chunk of Australia’s independent music.

The Jagermeister Independent Music Awards will be presented on Friday 1st October at the Forum Theatre in Melbourne.

Tickets are available to the general public and performers on the night will include Amity Affliction, Cloud Control, Joe Chindamo, British India, Sally Seltmann, and a hip-hop extravaganza from M-Phazes with Illy, Muph, Candice Monique, Solo and Mantra.

As Nick O’Byrne is keen to note “These sort of events aren’t often accessible to people, but there are tickets available. We actually want the general public to come and mix with the bands and hand out, drink and party with everyone.”

Check out the photos from last year’s awards presentation