Behind the absolute scenes
The most popular stories on NZ music history website AudioCulture during its first decade haven’t always been about our biggest stars.
AudioCulture ‒ Iwi Waiata turns 10 years old this month. In its first decade, the New Zealand music-heritage website published 2000 pages and profiled nearly a thousand artists, groups and industry players. But the article read more times than any other probably isn’t what you’d expect.
In October 2014, AudioCulture published Mike Hollywood’s history of Wellington nightclubs, from the first discos in the early 1970s, through to the boom in contemporary dance music 20 years later. The title – Wellington nightclubs in the 1980s – was prosaic in the extreme, but it did well in its first month online – and then the next month, and the one after. Month after month, these memories of DJs, dancing and dodgy bouncers turned up at the top or thereabouts of the site’s traffic data.
After a couple of years of this, technical staff were asked to look into the traffic and make sure it was legitimate, and that there wasn’t some bot in Russia delivering all the hits. They reported that as far as anyone could tell, the traffic was real and organic. Perhaps it’s just Wellington’s massed civil servants reliving their misspent youths, over and over.
For founding editor Simon Grigg, who conceived the site and persuaded NZ On Air to support it, it’s an example of the way what AudioCulture now categorises as “Scenes” strike a particular chord with readers: “They speak to our own personal experiences,” he says.
There’s no comprehensive Auckland equivalent on the site, but The Lost Nightlife of Inner-City Auckland, an AudioCulture spin-off launched on Facebook during the 2020 lockdown, has nearly 28,000 members. They still post
‒ pictures and memories of good times nearly every day.
Some pages take off because they are shared within enthusiast communities: twin articles on New Zealand-made guitars and amplifiers are both in the all-time top 10 and are the go-to link for anyone selling such items on Trade Me. Even the most popular profiles aren’t necessarily what you’d expect – the most-read artist profile over a decade is the one for the obscure, beloved singer of Jesus, I Was Evil, Darcy Clay.
“The biggest profiles are there because they’re the most interesting,” says AudioCulture content director Chris Bourke, noting that the next most popular profile is that of another complex character, Dragon’s Paul Hewson, with Split Enz close behind. On many pages, the real stars are the thousands of photographs, donated by scene photographers and, increasingly, liberated from formal archives.
AudioCulture’s audience has steadily grown and broadened and, crucially, moved past the men-of-a-certain-age to gender parity. The most distinctive element of the stats remains the sheer length of time readers will spend on each visit.
But Bourke, a music historian himself, is less excited by numbers than by AudioCulture’s take-up as a cultural resource.
“We want all genres and subcultures of New Zealand popular music to feel they are included, and treated with respect … the enthusiastic response to AudioCulture shows how much affection the public has for local artists. Just like early Rip It Up, AudioCulture feels like part of the musical community.”
To celebrate its 10th birthday, AudioCulture is polling readers on their pick for the best New Zealand album of all time. Go to audioculture.co.nz to vote. ▮
On many pages, the real stars are the thousands of donated photographs.