So you want to work in themusic biz?

Wed 16th Nov, 2011 in Features

So you want to be a music journalist? A radio host, publicist, or perhaps a festival promoter? This weekend over 100 music industry know-it-alls will converge on Melbourne for the fourth annual Face The Music conference to talk about how you can do just that.

Over two days anyone with a passing interest in making music (or working around it) will get the chance to pick the brains of guests such as SXSW’s Brent Grulke, Dan Rosen from ARIA, co-founder of Lollapalooza Ted Gardiner and music journalist Mikey Cahill.

In the lead up to the conference we asked host of Home and Hosed and triple j’s resident Australian music expert Dom Alessio (who is speaking on a panel about the art of music writing) to share the secret to his success. Read: how he blagged his way into two of music’s coolest jobs.

Dom Alessio – host of Home and Hosed

When did you realise you wanted to dedicate your whole life to this music biz?
I would say it was probably the third year that I was in uni. I went to uni studying psychology and it was something that I had in mind that I was going to do since year ten, but about half way through my degree I sort of learnt some things about studying psychology that I wasn’t a fan of. Like, even though I’d been told the degree was four years I’d need to do an extra two years on top of that to become a registered psychologist and not only that, Id have to do 100 hours unpaid work and the thought of having to work any more at my crappy retail job just made me shiver to the bone.

So I started to look elsewhere and at that stage I’d been writing a bit for the uni newspaper, mainly because I wanted free CDs – which I think is how everyone starts. Id been into music since I was five, but it kind of never occurred to me that, it could be a job and then that all changed in the third year. I was playing in bands and mucking around writing my reviews for the uni newspaper and I saw that there was a new magazine starting up called Hotpress Magazine. And I thought I’ve got nothing to lose, Ill email the editor and just bullshit. So I emailed her saying: “I’d like to write for your magazine, you’ll never meet anyone that knows more about music than me, yadda yadda yadda…bullshit bullshit bullshit!” I heard nothing for three months until the editor Jess called me back and said, “Alright, what do you want to write about?” And the first interview I ever did, which was in my fourth year of uni so 2005 was System Of A Down – the first interview I had done in my life!

That is quite a leap – how did the interview go?
I remember this interview for a really good reason- and I’m so glad it happened to me in my fist ever interview! I got one of those old dictaphones, with those little cassette tapes, to record the interview and I was interviewing Serj and John. It was face to face in their hotel room, I remember John answering most of the questions and Serj just kind of staring at me smiling in a kind of creepy clown way. I did the interview and I thought it was great, they offered me their room service which I denied because I think I was too nervous to eat. And when I went home to transcribe the interview I found that I had recorded three minutes of the chat, 15 minutes of silence and then two minutes at the end.

That is every music writer’s worst nightmare – what did you do?
I tried to write a 1000 word piece with five minutes of audio and whatever I could remember.

That will really test your skills as a music writer.
I had no skills, so that was the problem! I will still argue that I don’t have many, but I had none then. But I really loved it and then from there I did a bunch of interviews. I can remember doing a great one with Tim from Dappled Cities and I just really enjoyed it and I had so much fun writing these stories about musicians. After the fourth year of uni I came out, tried to find jobs in like HR departments, banks and whatnot and never really got anywhere.

Then I moved with my parents from the ‘burbs to the inner city and I was like I have to quit my shitty retail job now cause I’m sure as hell not driving every day. And I had nothing – I had no job – and I had to somehow earn money, so I called up the old editor of Hotpress, who had left, and said do you have any writing jobs going. She said she didn’t but that her friend Kirsty has just taken over as Editor of The Brag, and that’s how it all started.

And you were at The Brag for how many years?
I was at The Brag for two and half years because their Arts Editor – Cec Busby – had left to become the Editor of FasterLouder! So there was a free desk there and because I had nothing else to do I would go in there three days a week and write whatever stories Kirsty gave me, whatever the freelances didn’t want to do. So I was just writing all the time. And because I was there I started to learn the Art software and was sub-editing stuff so I was kind of gaining all these skills and that’s when the job of Arts Editor came up which, honestly, isn’t in my skill set at all because I don’t know a lot about film, or comedy or theatre or art but I pretended I did. And I remember I went for the interview and the bosses said “We’re concerned you’re only a rock guy?” And I was like, Nah I love film! And I must have convinced them enough to give me the job so that’s how I became the Arts Editor of The Brag.

How did you make the jump from Arts Editor to hosting your own show on triple j?
It’s probably three things. I got the Arts Editor job at The Brag and realised that I had no writing experience so I had to learn as fast as I could. So I was writing for anyone, whoever would take me Id start writing for – paid or unpaid. [Even a few cheeky articles for FasterLouder]

At about the time that I started writing for The Brag, FBi put out a call for presenter training and I thought, if I can get on FBi that will get my name out and there will be more chances to write and that will make me a better writer. So I got that, they trained me for 12 weeks and at the end of the 12 weeks I started doing the graveyard shift which is 1-6am, which I hated! I would work during the day at Brag, come home, sleep, wake up and stay awake til 6am. I didn’t really like it, but it was something that I had to do.

So after doing them for 2 or 3 months I had a meeting with the Program Director at the time, Megan Loader, who is now the program at triple j. There is a thing in radio called an ‘Air Check’ which is like the work equivalent of nails down a blackboard because you listen back to your own show and analyse yourself. So you know how people say ‘I hate the sound of my own voice’, well you hate it and have to listen to how you say things, and where you breath and all that kind of stuff. During this Megan said to me, “If you could do any show at FBi what would you do?” And I said well I work at The Brag on local music so Id really like to do The Bridge, which is their local music show. And it just so happened that the week after someone left The Bridge. And then FBi called me and I had the gig!

So that’s how I got involved in doing the Sydney music show on FBi, now for the third strain! At the same time myself and a mate of mine Jerry, who at the time was managing Young & Restless and who now manages Miami Horror, Parades and a bunch of other bands, realised that there wasn’t any blogs about Australian music around, so we started one of our own – Who The Bloody Hell Are They?

I was doing all that for two years – I was writing as much as I could, I was doing The Bridge one week a night on FBi and Gerry and I were running Who The Hell. At the end of 2008 triple j put out a press release saying “triple j are looking for bloggers”, so I Ill never get this job but I’ll apply. But slowly and surely I began to get more and more emails, ‘You’ve made the not so short list and then ‘You made the interview stage’. And I remember the final task of this elongated process is that I had to write a 15 song playlist as though I was hosting the Australian Music show. Now the thing with this interview process, at no point along the way had they said it was a job to host home and hosed! And then the next week I got a call from Chris Scadden ,who was the program director at triple at the time and now the station manager, and he just said “We’d like to offer you a job at triple j hosting Home and Hosed.

Face The Music – $40 ($30 concession) for one day or $60 ($50 concession) for two.
You can check out the whole program at www.facethemusic.org.au