What’s wrong with our music industry?
Kiwi music has struggled in everchanging times — but there is hope
Ben Campbell and Nathan King remember the exact moment their band Zed “made” it. It was a February afternoon in Christchurch and they were riding high on the success of their latest release Glorafilia, which had just entered the top 10 on the New Zealand singles chart.
The year was 2000 and they were one of three bands playing The Melt festival at Hagley Park, part of a council-run summer concert series.
“We were the support act,” recalls Campbell. “There was a fanbase up the front that just went crazy. There was a hysteria whereby, at the end of the gig, we had to jump in the van and speed away from backstage with probably 100 kids chasing after us and hitting the sides of the van windows and rocking the van. It felt like Beatlemania,” he laughs.
It was a breakthrough moment for Zed, who clocked up 10 top 40 hits between 1999 and 2004, when the band decided to go their separate ways.
But it wasn’t just Zed that took off that summer. The New Zealand music industry was entering a renaissance that would see a record number of domestic acts take over radio playlists and enter the charts.
Between 2000 and 2010, a staggering 324 New Zealand singles entered the top 40. By comparison, the seven years since has seen just 141 NZ tracks reach that same milestone. This year to date, only seven NZ songs have made it into the charts — and six of those were by Lorde.
So what changed? The answer is long and convoluted. It involves changing music tastes, consumer behaviour, funding and, most significantly, the rise of streaming.
2000: Kiwi music becomes cool again
It’s hard to pinpoint quite when the Kiwi music resurgence began, but by the year 2000, the tide was firmly rising. That year saw 12 Kiwi artists enter the top 40. The following year that number rose to 20 and, in 2002, it went up to 26.
New Zealand on Air (NZoA) head of music David Ridler, who worked for Channel Z at the time, attributes the change to some key breakthrough acts in the late 90s – specifically Supergroove, Bic Runga and The Feelers.
“They were everywhere. That made the record companies go, ‘there’s something here’.”
Zed frontman King agrees, and says by the early 2000s, attitudes had changed.
“There was a sense of national pride welling up with our music. A sense of ‘we can do this as well as anyone offshore’. I think there was a really great batch of songwriting that occurred during that period. A lot of songs that people nowadays still sing along to and know. It was something quite special. At the time we didn’t really understand it or realise what we were in. We only got a sense of it after the fact.”
Chris Caddick was the managing director of EMI Music New Zealand at the time, which went on to sign more than a dozen Kiwi acts during that era, including Pluto, Goldenhorse and OpShop, among others.
The label set a deliberate strategy to release more New Zealand music, he says, as the British-owned company tried to compete with its US-owned rivals.
“We were the weakest of all the international labels in terms of generating American hits,” he explains. “There was a greater need to have more repertoire to meet our targets. It wasn’t just coming on a plane from New York or LA each week. We felt that we might be able to generate more hits by having a great local roster.”
And they did. EMI’s artists dominated the charts and local radio for the better part of a decade, before the label’s NZ office closed in 2013, following the global merger of EMI and Universal Music.
The decision coincided with another key development: Helen Clark’s Labour Government.
Two years after taking power, Clark’s Government announced the Cultural Recovery Package, which included an additional $7 million annual funding for NZoA and nearly doubled the amount of music funding available.
That year saw NZoA introduce its Phase Four strategy, which included a $50,000 grant for the recording and promotion of albums. Record companies had to match the investment but suddenly the music game was a lot less risky.
“It wasn’t a handout,” explains Caddick. “It was like having a nice backstop and you knew that if you didn’t succeed, you weren’t going to go down for the count. Given that we were answerable to overseas bosses, it certainly gave us comfort.”
The money not only encouraged labels to invest in local artists, it gave musicians the freedom to record in quality studios and improve their production values.
It wasn’t just funding that was changing. In 2002, radio stations committed to a new voluntary target system, aiming to increase the amount of NZ music they played from 13 per cent to 20 per cent by the year 2006.
Suddenly people were hearing more New Zealand music — and they liked what they heard.
Zed’s Campbell recalls: “All of a sudden New Zealand music really started engaging with the general public and people weren’t just being fed American music and British music. Radio stations starting meeting the voluntary New Zealand music targets and as a result New Zealand music was put on a level playing field with these international artists.”
2005 – 2008: Changing Fortunes
The mid-2000s saw New Zealand music peak in terms of the number of chart entries. In 2005 alone, 32 Kiwi artists clocked up 36 separate top 40 hits. The following year saw 36 Kiwi artists enter the charts. Songs like Hollie Smith’s Bathe in
the River and The Tutts’ K were everywhere. But physical sales were starting to nosedive as piracy became an accepted way of life for many music lovers.
Recorded Music New Zealand (RMNZ) revenue began falling from 2001, but the downward trend accelerated from 2005. Between 2001 and 2014, RMNZ’s revenue nearly halved from $120m to $66m.
That loss of revenue hit record labels hard, with redundancies rolled out across several local offices in 2004, including Warner Music, EMI and Universal Music. Sony and BMG New Zealand merged, with top executive Michael Glading just one of the high-profile casualties.
But though record companies were downsizing, Kiwi artists kept pumping out music and the arrival of iTunes here in 2007 made music more accessible than ever.
With the costly production of physical records no longer a barrier, more and more Kiwi artists began releasing music. In 2007 the number of New Zealand singles tracked for chart inclusion jumped to 2461, up from 1506 the previous year.
In 2008, the Global Financial Crisis hit markets around the world. But while the timing coincided with the declining fortunes of the music industry, most people agree it played only a small part in the decline of New Zealand music.
The bigger issue was that consumer behaviour was changing — as were music tastes
2010: The end of the $50k grant
After a decade of funding New Zealand albums, NZoA announced it would end the Phase Four scheme.
Despite clearly delivering on its goals of creating hit records to get more music on commercial radio, there was growing criticism of the programme.
Chris Caddick, who by that point had left EMI, was commissioned by NZoA to write a report on the scheme, interviewing more than 100 industry figures to collate their feedback.
Much of the criticism centred on the commercial nature of NZoA funding and the emphasis on commercial success ahead of creativity or diversity.
“The criticism was largely illinformed,” says Caddick. “It was pretty distasteful criticism, given the goodwill NZoA had generated and the tangible results it had achieved. I found it bordering on offensive but it was my job to be neutral and record and report what people were saying.”
Regardless, the consensus was that it was time for change. A new system was introduced called Making Tracks, which focused solely on the recording and release of individual tracks with less focus on commercial success or radio play.
The result was more artists having access to funding but fewer people heard their music.
As Ridler explains: “There was no funding you could spend on promotion or marketing. We ended up with a lot of videos on YouTube that nobody watched because they weren’t promoted.”
Last year, a new funding model was launched, which aims to combine the best of both worlds. A project fund will grant artists up to $30,000 to record an album or EP, while a singles fund can grant artists up to $8000 for individual tracks.
2013: Enter Spotify
The arrival of digital downloads and MP3s had a huge impact on the industry but nothing prepared people for the next step: On-demand streaming.
Spotify launched in New Zealand in 2012 and changed the game almost instantly.
In 2013, it was included in the NZ music charts and had an immediate impact. Between 2013 and present day, the number of Kiwi artists to produce a top 40 single has declined from 26 to just two. Lorde and Six60 are the only Kiwis to have charted this year.
Paul Kennedy, who compiles data for Recorded Music New Zealand explains: “[Streaming has] definitely hindered New Zealand music getting into the chart. The door is still open for a hit — you still get Lorde going to number one — but there’s a few new barriers for New Zealand acts that weren’t there before.”
Where once you just needed 1000 people to buy your single in a week, he says, now you need 100,000 people to stream your song in the same period.
“You used to have a very controlled marketplace,” explains Kennedy. “You had a certain number of singles out, stock would run out and someone else would come in. Whereas now we’re in a world where everything is available all the time. It used to be the record label would move on to their next single or next artist because the stock wouldn’t be available anymore but now they have to wait for the public to get over something.”
The result is a more stagnant, less diverse chart. It was an issue which came to the fore when Ed Sheeran released his latest album Divide in March and claimed an unprecedented 16 spots on the New Zealand singles chart.
“It’s a fair system in terms of the data,” explains Kennedy. “But whether it is the best representation of how interesting the music world is, that’s another question. That’s the battle.”
The Sheeran incident led to a change both here and in the United Kingdom, which now limits how many songs from a single artist can chart at any one time. It also started a conversation at RMNZ around possible new charts that reflect what’s dynamic and growing.
Those conversations are still under way but the consensus is clear — the current system isn’t quite right.
And there are other hurdles with streaming that are particularly challenging for Kiwi artists. The algorithms used to drive Spotify and Apple Music rely on collating data from global user behaviour. Because New Zealand is such a small market, it’s hard for the system to pick up meaningful patterns.
That means it can’t distinguish between the likes of Six60 and Shihad, or Fat Freddy’s Drop and David Dallas. It’s all just tagged “New Zealand music”, which results in a particularly confused and disjointed listening experience.
2014 – Present day: Changing Tastes
When Lorde stormed the charts and Grammy Awards three years ago, she did so with a sound and style previously unheard of from a New Zealand act.
She and producer Joel Little tapped into a global move towards electronic dance pop and did it incredibly well. But New Zealand musicians, by and large, don’t produce that type of music.
“A lot of New Zealand musicians tend towards a more alt-indie, guitar sound,” explains Ridler, stressing that he is speaking in broad terms. “Looking at the amount of applications we get, the demand is overwhelmingly indie artists.”
Fifteen years ago, that sound was the height of cool, dominating global pop radio. Today, it is strictly out of bounds.
“I think the move away from any kind of rock influence in the mainstream pop and Hot AC [adult contemporary] radio is really key. That’s a worldwide thing as well. Rock has been so out of favour for so long,” says Ridler
The Future: On the up?
The number of Kiwi artists entering the charts may seem bleak but it really doesn’t reflect the depth of talent or international success that many artists are achieving.
Artists like The Naked and Famous have more than 1.6 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Broods has 1.5 million. Newcomer Aldous Harding has clocked up more than 730,000 monthly listeners since releasing her debut album in May.
And all that streaming equals money. After bottoming out in 2014, RMNZ revenue is on the rise again, up $20m in the past two years. 2017 is on track to deliver another boost, with Kiwis streaming more than 5.1 million tracks so far this year, up from 4 million in 2016. “There’s definitely lots of optimism and positivity over the last few years,” says RMNZ chief executive Damian Vaughan. “There’s more money, it’s growing and it feels healthier.”
But it’s not all smooth sailing just yet, says Ridler, who admits it keeps him up at night wondering how to reinvigorate the industry.
“You look at Aldous Harding’s success overseas and the breathless reviews — that’s a record that came through our project funding. We’ve been able to help support that record but I still know, in my heart of hearts, that Aldous Harding will never get played on The Edge or ZM. Most of their listeners will never hear of her.”