Big Sound Music Summit

Mon 20th Sep, 2010 in Gig Reviews

For those not familiar with Big Sound, it’s a music industry conference that hosts delegates from all over the world. For three days, pseudo-intellectuals, music nerds and smarmy industry types descend on Brisbane to schmooze, booze and talk all things music.

Day 1
The conference begins with an insightful Q&A session with Michael Azerrad, author of Our Band Could Be Your Life, following the career of thirteen bands from the American Indie Underground from 1981-1991, and Come As You Are, which documents the story of Nirvana. When researching Our Band Could Be Your Life, Azerrad chose to focus on one band that best represented each era and genre. When asked which story he finds the most inspiring, he responds, The Butthole Surfers. They may have done a lot of drugs but they also worked and toured hard, even picking up bottles for the 5 cent return because they were so poor. He suggests that the essence of success is hard work and preparation, quoting baseball executive Branch Rickey, ‘Luck is the residue of design’.

Azerrad comments that the history of the American indie underground culture is still relevant today. Those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, he says. The real lessons from that era can be found in the way underground bands made their own systems because they were being shunned by the mainstream. Now, instead of fanzines there are blogs and instead of cassette compilations there are mp3s but the mentality hasn’t changed. More than ever, it is incredibly easy to get your music out there and technology has empowered the do-it-yourself process.

I stay for the next panel, About The Future – New Models, but really I shouldn’t have bothered. This session is remarkably similar to one held at Big Sound last year and I am pretty sure they have even recycled some of the panel members. The same panic of ‘What are we going to do about declining CD sales?’ is thrown about and one year later, they still don’t have a solution. There is talk of Spotify, an unlimited streaming application that is yet to reach Australia, and how it is set to ruin the music industry and artist royalties. The only thing the panel agrees on is that, with such an endless supply of music, there is a lot of clutter around and few people are willing to sit and filter through the crap. Hence, we need to rely on trusted sources like radio or friends to tell us what’s good.

With that in mind, I head to the Promotions, Publicity and Plugging Master Class, which probably should have been named Promotions, Publicity and Plugging for Triple J. While the panelists do talk about having a good live act and building hype through touring, in the end the consensus is that you need radio backing to get your music out there. When an audience member asks what to do if your band doesn’t fit into the moulds of either Triple J or the commercial radios, few panelists can offer a solution.

Next is A Great Live Music Experience, which is a disappointing experience, considering the subject matter. The panelists give fairly unemotional accounts of best and worst live experiences, failing to excite this reviewer whatsoever. A few things are suggested that contribute to a good show – good sound mix, good catering, interesting one-off collaborations – but in the end, it seems they are trying too hard to decipher something that is essentially undecipherable.

Day 2
Day Two begins with a Q&A session with Brian Ritchie, curator of MONA FOMA (Museum of Old and New Art – Festival of Music and Art) but better known as a founding member of Violent Femmes. It must be hard having been in an internationally acclaimed band as nothing you do since can ever live up to that. Ritchie is questioned extensively about the history of the Femmes. For example, a record label wanted them to re-record their debut with session musicians. They told them to fuck off. They asked Nirvana to support their Australian tour. By the time they were meant to play, Nirvana had become the biggest band in the world. They offered Nirvana the headline but they refused. Almost as an afterthought, he is asked about his current curator role at MONA FOMA. For anyone wondering, it’s a museum of ultra-contemporary art and antiquities, with a music festival thrown in.

The Entrepreneurialism and Music session turns out to be one of the most interesting of the whole conference. Most of the panelists started their own business out of necessity and love, because they needed a platform to spread incredible music. None of them seem particularly ‘corporate’ and tend to see their business as a strange intersection between art and commerce. They talk about the need to take calculated risks and believing in them; however, there is a certain level of responsibility when you are gambling with an artist’s dreams. There is some heated debate over what defines an entrepreneur and at one point, a few panelists seem close to punching out another particularly condescending member but it all dies down before anything gets out of hand.

In stark contrast to other panels that focus on how to make money from music, Making A Difference discusses the social conscience of the music industry. The panelists agree that in-your-face social campaigns rarely work and that it has become unpopular to do political music. Nevertheless, there have been some significant wins in recent times, particularly the success of Gurrumul as an inspiration to the Indigenous community and the transition from jewel cases to digipaks for the environment.

Day 3
In one of the best panels of the conference, Management and Marriage combines the right amount of advice with entertainment. The similarities between management and marriage are discussed, mostly that there needs to be mutual respect and trust. Once that is broken and the lines of communication are gone, then the relationship goes sour. On the other hand, some panelists suggest management to be like raising children – bands need nurturing in the first few years, after which they go through a period of rebellion and then after that, it’s smooth sailing. In fact, the panel can’t decide whether managing bands is like marriage or raising children, until one panelist quips that maybe it’s like marrying your children.

On The Road – What Goes On Tour We Share With You is as risqué and amusing as you would expect. The panelists recount stories about finding a dead person in the crowd, throwing beer at a sound person and lots and lots of anecdotes involving drugs. For fear of incriminating anyone involved and also because there is no way I can possibly retell them in the same light, I’m not going repeat them, sorry. It’ll have to stay on tour.

A Q&A session with Robert Forster finishes off the conference. Forster recounts the early days of the Go-Betweens which, for anyone who has read Pig City, is a familiar story. He reflects that he was extremely lucky when he asked his best friend Grant McLennan to play bass, because it turned out McLennan was a naturally good songwriter. He speaks fondly of McLennan as a person and as a songwriter. When McLennan started putting childhood memories in a poetic way in pop music, Forster reflects, it was unique, nobody was doing that.

Forster comments that he was lucky that the first four songs they released all turned out to be classics. Of course, some would call that talent but that’s how modest and matter-of-fact he is about it. Even now, as a producer, he is still adamant about good songwriting. He will always get a band to play a song acoustically before recording to get to the core of it and to hear it as it was originally written. It’s all about the songs, he says emphatically. And with that wisdom from a master musician, Big Sound is over for another year.