The logic and unreality of BIGSOUND 2025

BIGSOUND is the death-drive of industry. It is schoolies for the regressed creative precariat, a smoky backroom for Australian music’s deep state. It is Davos for indie rock egotists, the World Economic Forum for moustache-mullet-earring as uniform. Those in their 20s begging to be exploited and those with memories of how cool street press was in the 80s who know how to do the exploiting. But perhaps that is giving both sides too much credit. BIGSOUND is less about the husks who occupy positions of power and more about the totalizing trans-human logic of capital. The core of BIGSOUND is quickly revealed in its refusal to pay artists and opaque, hype-centric criteria as to who is allowed to play. It is a humiliation ritual. There is no room to question whether Spotify, TikTok or multi-billion dollar companies should play a role in local music. Your job as a delegate is to learn the hamstring stretches, touch your fucking toes and post on socials.

Metrics = artistic value! Brands > bands! Your content isn’t optimized enough (fool)!

There is an overwhelming sense this is all inevitable; that the industry isn’t in control of the environment they portend to and are actually in a state of catching-up to the ever-expediting (un)reality of media and communication technology. In the world BIGSOUND claims to mediate, music is not a site of resistance, community, or politics but engagement, demographics and ‘vibe’. It is barely, BARELY a world where art can or should exist. What passes for such is merely a vehicle for platforms, Oztix, LiveNation, Sony, Amazon and the Queensland Government to put their logo on. Let us not forget that Spotify was founded by advertising executives who could’ve picked literally any other form of media, but saw in music something naive and ready-for-the-taking. Or that TikTok is essentially the international-facing data extraction arm of the Chinese government. Or that LiveNation is single-handedly destroying entire swathes of the independent music ecology in the US. Lets not even get into the links between all those entities and the military-industrial complex. But regardless, the ethos here is that local scenes are something to be overcome, and commercial imperatives ‘figured out’.

There is tremendous music all across Australia/New Zealand and I’m extremely relieved to find only the faintest evidence of it here.

BIGSOUND is a chance for artists to ‘build their team’ and to play in-front of crowds they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. They make introductions, receive emails, and occasionally feel validated that all this out-of-pocket effort was worthwhile. I’m sure there is some benefit for the ambitious b(r)ands getting around, but I’m equally sure that whatever benefits are generated from this marketing exercise (read: music conference) are distributed unevenly. I don’t mean to ride on my high horse about all this, sure, get paid if you can. Of the 130 bands playing, a dozen or so will be able to break even on a couple of European tours through dissociating and posting content for the rest of their lives. Rehearsals for candid short form content; performances for professional short form content; everyday life for behind-the-scenes short form content; the interstices of your schedule for checking analytics of short form content and DEFINITELY NOT KILLING YOURSELF. If you were to, where else would TikTok get their content? There’s ways around it by using AI, probably.

Lyotard – with tongue poking out – once said, you “can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâté [or rolls for that matter] [...] of course we suffer, we the capitalized, but this does not mean that we do not enjoy, nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy—for what?—does not disgust us, even more. We abhor therapeutics and its vaseline, we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid. And don’t wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either”.

I’m wary of this write-up being too didactic; trying to offer a ‘remedy’ or demonize the enjoyment of ‘swallowing the shit of [BIGSOUND]’. So I’m not going to go too hard on any of the bands or NPCs (not-problematic-creators) who sit down eagerly and unquestioningly at the TikTok masterclass. In fact, I admire their adherence to the accelerationist ethos. Of course, it ends with the extinction of local culture and eventually, humanity. But there is something to be said for remaining sceptical of anthropomorphism or that culture in of itself is inherently worth protecting. 

They are, at least, in my opinion, more moral actors than those who have attended BIGSOUND ironically. There’s no worse stench on a musician than trying to be the coolest and most detached participant of something so involved and lame. If you don’t care so much, then stay home cunt! Leave the selling-out to those who know how to do it properly. As an artist, half-assing something like this is a criminal act of liminality, either burn it down or lube your sphincter. Have you not been paying attention? We are in a moment of transition but it’s not ambiguous. There is actually no room left for ambivalence. Side with your local scene, or with the algorithm. Remove all your music from Spotify or join the IDF. Either try to make money or try to have integrity. Sometimes integrity can lead to money, but I wouldn’t count on it, or BIGSOUND generating either.

The Valley is a fitting back-drop for such a clusterfuck. One of the most hypercommercialised nightlife zones in the country at its most tame (competition with Canberra is tight). It’s bewildering that Brisbane, with the largest, most sprawling local council in Australia has a single, centralised zone in which all of its clubs/noisy pubs are congregated. Quick bit of history as to how we got here because I feel on a roll. The cheap rents of The Valley which attracted a vibrant ecology of venues and rehearsal spaces in the 90s were quickly appropriated by property developers at the turn of the century. Long-established performance spaces were threatened by noise complaints from people who decided to move into the hub of live music in Brisbane. There was outrage, grassroots movements, academic deliberation and eventually (surprisingly) actual policy. And so The Valley was designated a special entertainment precinct in the early 00s in an effort to curb rapid gentrification and direct the trajectories of ‘urban renewal’. But what was sold as an establishing of infrastructure for the local scene turned out to be a cover story for controlling it – or at the very least, appearing to be supportive of Powderfinger.

What was meant to foster/protect the local scene actually became the pathway for its astroturfing. Now The Valley was a designated zone for music, the work to help music was done. If you tried to start a venue outside this specific area, there were no special considerations, you were treated the same as those under Bjieke-Peterson. Why try to start a venue anywhere near residential housing if a single noise complaint could shut down your enterprise? If you want to ‘do’ live music, then you do it ‘here’. There is no place for organic development of venues relative to where audiences live. Again, you do music ‘here’. Of course this catastrophically fucked live music in-general across the town and created a kill-zone in The Valley. Almost immediately upon my first teenage tours of the precinct, I had multiple friends punched in the back of the head, a couple glassed, countless staunched. The government tried to curb this general pattern by forcing venues to employ additional security guards and scanners at the entrance. This created higher insurance premiums for venues, generally inflated the operating cost of venues in The Valley, and did little to address the actual root causes of violence in the area. 

Now, the dynamic of The Valley is one where only the most well-endowed can afford to start a business, and to survive, competition hinges on booking big gigs and selling bulk piss. There is no graffiti to be seen, only street art and it all fucking sucks. It’s a testament to the doggedness of the locals that places like The Bearded Lady, Season Three, Burst City, Cave Inn, Echo & Bounce, and a handful of others managed to gain a foothold in The Valley’s peripheries in-spite of all this. Support for these integral, nascent and COOL venues is or was, obviously, non-existent. But for better or worse, such indifference, plight, and formalisation is what has always afforded those in Brisbane’s margins their bonafide edge.

But the margins are not what BIGSOUND is about. As daddy Marx once said, “under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him [sic.]”. BIGSOUND is the embodiment and structure of such coercive external forces – dexies to be eaten, asses to be kissed, follow-up emails to be drafted. It is a celebration of and revelling in the antagonisms towards local music: both as a concept and against the people who actually make it happen. Spotify, LiveNation, and TikTok are not the enemies of grassroots music in this model, but the supposed allies of its functioning. BIGSOUND concretises such an inversion, rejecting the idea that earning a million streams, selling a thousand tickets or creating a viral video are for outliers. These are, in fact, the norm. Something every artist can, and should achieve.

Your gig under a bridge, cassette tapes given to a friend or flyers produced through university printers are the perversions and behaviours to be adjusted. You are not to establish your own idiosyncratic forms of distribution and promotion. You are to get a tripod, start a podcast, run it for six months, realise you have nothing to say and become a social media manager. At least you get a free tote bag and some schooners at the mixer. The funding, the support, the interest, the validation – that is for BIGSOUND and anything that exists outside of that, at least, in Brisbane, can fuck off and die. Venues are to exist in one area and cater only to crowds in the hundreds. They are to play at set decibel levels and each punter to consume gregarious amounts of alcohol. The only real tragedy here is that there is no opportunity for sports betting companies to get involved.

I also take back what I said about the high horse, I’ve decided that it is actually quite nice up here.

I would have more respect for BIGSOUND if they held the entire conference over the weekend rather than during the week. I’m sure it would be a logistic nightmare as far as crowd control goes, but lets not present that Valley for what it isn’t. If the industry is here writ large then they too should have to battle the yobbos, the disaffected, and the predator-prey dynamics the area begets. Although the precinct couldn’t be more commericalised if it tried, its true form would be too much for the BIGSOUND crowd. The lanyard is what wags the dog across these three days. Wearing one on a Friday night would make one too much a target. They would have to remove such identifying material like an officer removing their chevrons to avoid a sniper’s sights. Of course there would be some like Lord Nelson who lean into the uniform. But hopefully they too would be blasted in the stomach with a baguette-sized splinter.

I guess I should probably touch on some of the music I saw. There were five good bands in-total: Georgia Knight, Spike Fuck, Shock Corridor, Denzel Kennedy and Grecco Romank. Of course, two of these were involved in a Roused At! Show earlier in the week – one of the few local actors who actually care enough about Brisbane music to do something within it. I watched about a dozen other acts, all meagre variations of high-rotation Triple J swill. The least offensive of these was Borderline, the most commercially viable was probably The Tullamarines, and the most offensive was Letter to Lions although I’m sure there was much worse going about. As much as it pains me to report, I did hear a folk-grunge cover of Creep at one point. In-general there was a surprising amount of music that eschewed lyrics for melodic ooohs and ahhhs which I found annoying. Lots of demands made of crowds also: “ok BIGSOUND, I want you to go crazy for this one!” or “come on BIGSOUND clap your hands!”. I also, unsurprisingly, found this trite but the transgression is minor in the scope of the hellscape in which such acts are performed.

It is impossible to imagine a future where BIGSOUND disentangles itself from corporate logics of music-making, or advocates for bands on behalf of their artistic merit rather than virality on TikTok. But if there is anything reassuring about the whole thing, it is the palpable feeling of uncool. The vibe is undeniably fucking beat. There are no tastemakers present, just half-baked tactics for an impenetrable algorithm and appeals to an indifferent oligopoly. Bands that could give it a sense of cultural legitimacy have no need for what it offers. BIGSOUND doesn’t rely on ticket sales to function, so the crowds are completely irrelevant to its operations. The ideal of the punter is simply a prop for Spotify to hold while speaking directly to the major labels who see the gig-going masses as nothing but wallets. BIGSOUND can’t develop taste because ultimately it is the playground of big companies rather than a medium of artistic development.

I can't even imagine how many Utopia-style meetings transpired to make this happen, let alone the sheer number of powerpoint slides which will be generated in its wake. While the event is the stuff of nightmares for anyone with a modicum of righteousness, it likely does look good on an infographic. But yeah, the ‘local’ is foregrounded insofar as it can be marketed. There’s no way to ‘fix’ BIGSOUND beyond a continual reduction of what it is: a conduit for capital and all its distortions.