There’s a guy in Wellington making a photocopied weekly gig guide which will do more for the local music scene than this attempt at making a profitable social media. I guarantee it.
Its actually a small volunteer crew not one guy, and they are great!
We have shared their posts on our socials, they do the guide, a weekly access radio show, free classifieds, all self funded... Which is exactly what Propel exists to support.
On the profitable social media bit. I have been a worker in the scene for 8 years, running events, promoting other people, pushing the scene. And i'll keep doing it here because I love it, not because theres money in it.
> Live performance revenue reached $329 million, well above pre-Covid levels.
Is that inflation-adjusted? And as the article points out, very little of that is local talent, so it's likely some of that's due to the cost of tickets.
As someone who lived in NZ (although Wellington) for 10 years until last year, the local music scene was there, but at least in Wellington, the change in the 10 years I was there was considerable: The earthquake in 2016 progressively caused several venues on Cuba Street to close due to building regulations, and Covid was a significant shock as well, with some of the smaller (although most places in Wellington were small!) gig rooms / bars / breweries that would often host bands closing.
There was still Valhalla, San Fran, The Rogue & Vagabond and others, but it just didn't feel as much was going on other than for things like Cuba Dupa street festival, etc, or the Jazz weekends that would be held.
As the article points out, this is not localised to NZ, it's happening in Australia and the UK as well in terms of venues/pubs closing and live music not being quite the draw it once was because of that.
Yep, here in Oz (Victoria) the scene is struggling. You see some glimpses trying to keep it going but it is rare.
Sometimes it feels like all we have is King Gizzard occasionally and then nothing but DJ's and cover bands to fill the gaps at the local RSL. Places like The Croxton still put on a great spread however.
It has been about 8 years since I was last in Wellington, it seemed to still have some stuff going for it but it was also clear that the decline was setting in.
Strong disagree. There are many venues playing local bands in Melbourne all the time. The Retreat, the Corner Hotel, Workers Club, the Esplanade, Northcote Social and Northcote Theatre, Billboards.
I can't speak to what the scene was like 10 years ago, but to say that its rare feels very wrong to me.
I think the difference might be that, whilst there is still a fair bit on offer if you look closely enough, you now have to look closely enough rather than just being able to stumble upon it.
Same as the 'modern music sucks' argument. Great modern music is there if you do the work, but if you're passive you'll only get the clones of what was popular (via payola) yesterday.
Same for electronic music in Australia - well off context here but fora such as spraci, ITM, and then its sibling FL were great for discovering and connecting with new music and people.
First it was a massage/sauna place called The San Francisco Bathhouse, and then it kept that name when it turned to a live venue. Now it is just San Fran.
No idea how it looked in New Zealand, but after covid "ended"* there were a lot of people who simply wanted to go out - after spending so much time indoors.
I suspect that people went out more in 2023-2025, but then they reversed to the mean + economic impacts (of money printing everywhere) hit.
* by the way, did covid officially ever end? the new variants seem to be still there, but it just stopped being covered by media after Russia invaded Ukraine)
In New Zealand there were only a few weeks of lockdown followed by much time when people could go out without any fear.
COVID never ended (we chose that). The pandemic turned to an endemic, which is a way of saying that the plan is now natural selection, as everyone will get infected (most people already have been). The death rates have somewhat reduced, but not to the extent that it's as harmless as the cold. Essentially it's now a particularly nastseasonal flu strain. If you're vaccinated, no you aren't, because COVID mutates as fast as any other flu and you last got vaccinated for it years ago.
In the US deaths peaked at >450k in 2021 and then fell <80k in 2023. They have roughly halved each year since (on track for ~10k this year. There are about 30-40k deaths each year due to influenza so this isn't really news any more.
Most everyone is vaccinated except the young who seem to have relatively mild infections. Of course there are probably excess cardiac deaths due to immune response, but that's even smaller and much more difficult to measure or determine cause for.
New Zealand locked down less than a lot of countries, but other than people with health problems I see no signs that people aren't going out any more due to Covid.
However due to other reasons people definitely have less money for discretionary activities, especially the youth.
And no, Covid never ended. It's still here, it's still killing and disabling people, but due to vaccines and antivirals it's less prevalent than it was.
Yeah, we had a very strict initial lockdown, and closed the border, once the number of cases went to 0 we opened up again, we then had regional lockdowns after cases broke the border quarantine.
Our level 4 lockdown was scored at 95/100 ("extreme") by the Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker. Our border lockdowns and MIQ system were extreme and very prolonged stretching into 2022 and even impacted returning citizens.
The claim I was initially responding to was, "New Zealand locked down less than a lot of countries". Not specifically length. NZ lockdown was especially strict in some regards (level 4, border lockdown) and especially prolonged in others (Auckland lockdown, border and MIQ).
we just locked down quick and strict, we then were one of the only places you could go about life relatively normally without too much worry while the rest of the world went through comparatively ineffective lock downs and rrestrictions.
"This is not a New Zealand quirk. It is the local edge of a global collapse. Pitchfork, the most influential music publication in the world, was folded into GQ in 2024 and its editor-in-chief was laid off. Local music press has been gutted in the US, the UK and Australia. New Zealand just got there first and hardest, because we were small to begin with."
Aotearoa (NZ) has fired up the four way flashers. We ignore it at our peril.
I like that this is bringing out all the kiwi accounts. I've never seen so many of us all in one post. Hey guys! I'm a wannabe software engineer who's in Wellington, I had self-taught myself fairly well until LLMs has made me question if I completely wasted my 20s on what could now be a fools dream. Hope you're all going well!
Always looking for ways to spread community in our recalcitrant people, I'm not sure this is the right direction but it's a goal worth attempting until it works. Well done!
This is probably the place to say if you want to come play in this space you really ought to go to KawaiiCon - AoNZ's kinder/nicer DEFCON - in Wellington over the Halloween weekend, tickets available now, be in before they sell out
I think the content of the article highlights the exact reason why the music died. Large portions of the text are simply a powerpoint presentation with numbers, and stats and percentages and not enough about people enjoying the music.
Yip. I couldn't find anything in it for _me_. It's all about artists talking about artists.
The events page has very low res photos which seems amateur.
i used to love going to gigs when i was living in hong kong, didn't find many interesting gigs over here after i moved to auckland 2 years ago. maybe yeah coverage of local gigs is exactly what we need - but seems like the platform is only for DJs. you cited The Beths and general industry decline, then built a platform that's explicitly electronic-only, which falls a bit short
> And yet local artists captured as little as 9 percent of New Zealand streaming, download and physical sales revenue in 2024. In the official end-of-year Top 50 singles chart, exactly one New Zealand track appeared. Radio plays local music, but only two nationwide commercial stations exceeded 20 percent local content.
This seems amazingly high for local content in a small English speaking market, unless that's all just Crowded House.
As a New Zealand musician I'd never heard of this, so I got excited for a moment but I see it's only for Electronic music artists, which isn't me. I'm glad someone's trying though.
In 2012 and for a while after, NZ had a government-run website called "The Audience" where any musician could sign up and they'd track listens etc, and the top artists would get actual sponsorship. That was a quite cool idea. The URL is still there with the old logo but it's no longer the same thing.
I really wish it was easier for artists of all types to be seen if their work resonates, regardless of their audience or marketing budget or why they know. I also realise it's kind of an impossible dream; even a perfect analysis algorithm would only shift the power to its creator. Valve seems to be trying quite uniquely hard to do a good job with Steam's discovery system and I appreciate them a lot for that.
AI slop article about an extremely niche industry in an irrelevant country? I’ll pass.
What part of this is ostensibly intellectually stimulating because it seems like transparent marketing to me, and poor marketing at that. We don’t need posts for every GoFundMe currently in existence. NZ doesn’t have the population to support something so nice, it’s really that simple lol.
“Put those two facts together and you get the real story. The scene is alive and economically significant, but it has lost its mirror. There is no one left whose job is to tell you what happened at the show last night, which local producer just signed to an overseas label, or why a 34-year-old venue went under owing $692,000.”
But decline of quality press & local press is a very big problem.
On another board there is a person who (for free) collects information about people who lost their lives in car accidents during every summer vacation. That person tries to link to articles that described what happened. More and more, there are simply no articles -> because there is no more local press, even a local portal that would write about it.
In a way it's on the people - who dont want to pay for content.
Perhaps due to some content shifted to youtube, tiktok or facebook.
I couldn't be more enthusiastic about the local music scene here. But that doesn't mean I'm going to read AI slop about it. If you want to promote the arts, start by using your own words.
> But that doesn't mean I'm going to read AI slop about it. If you want to promote the arts, start by using your own words.
which leads to the next piece of the puzzle, “we lost our quality writers and what we’re doing to get it back.”
there are people who enjoy writing about their passions such as music scenes, tech, arts, maker scenes, etc,.. how do we put them together with the people who are passionate about building something for local music scenes? and no, i don’t think the answer is, “oooh, let’s build another app.”
There’s a guy in Wellington making a photocopied weekly gig guide which will do more for the local music scene than this attempt at making a profitable social media. I guarantee it.
http://www.theimage04.com
Its actually a small volunteer crew not one guy, and they are great! We have shared their posts on our socials, they do the guide, a weekly access radio show, free classifieds, all self funded... Which is exactly what Propel exists to support.
On the profitable social media bit. I have been a worker in the scene for 8 years, running events, promoting other people, pushing the scene. And i'll keep doing it here because I love it, not because theres money in it.
but if you are not volunteering then your ability to do it still depends on there being money in it.
Similarly invaluable resource for San Francisco - The List:
Gloriously web 1.0, extremely functional and easy to scan through.There is so much dense information in a single pamphlet. Beautiful.
reminds me of https://nyc-noise.com/
Reminds me of the Tokyo Gig Guide, which I always hit up when I’m in town.
https://www.tokyogigguide.com/en/
That is brilliant!
I love the older style layout, it is much more readable that 99% of websites available today. Also that Classified section is wonderful.
that's beautiful, I really wish there was more media like this
> Live performance revenue reached $329 million, well above pre-Covid levels.
Is that inflation-adjusted? And as the article points out, very little of that is local talent, so it's likely some of that's due to the cost of tickets.
As someone who lived in NZ (although Wellington) for 10 years until last year, the local music scene was there, but at least in Wellington, the change in the 10 years I was there was considerable: The earthquake in 2016 progressively caused several venues on Cuba Street to close due to building regulations, and Covid was a significant shock as well, with some of the smaller (although most places in Wellington were small!) gig rooms / bars / breweries that would often host bands closing.
There was still Valhalla, San Fran, The Rogue & Vagabond and others, but it just didn't feel as much was going on other than for things like Cuba Dupa street festival, etc, or the Jazz weekends that would be held.
As the article points out, this is not localised to NZ, it's happening in Australia and the UK as well in terms of venues/pubs closing and live music not being quite the draw it once was because of that.
Yep, here in Oz (Victoria) the scene is struggling. You see some glimpses trying to keep it going but it is rare.
Sometimes it feels like all we have is King Gizzard occasionally and then nothing but DJ's and cover bands to fill the gaps at the local RSL. Places like The Croxton still put on a great spread however.
It has been about 8 years since I was last in Wellington, it seemed to still have some stuff going for it but it was also clear that the decline was setting in.
Strong disagree. There are many venues playing local bands in Melbourne all the time. The Retreat, the Corner Hotel, Workers Club, the Esplanade, Northcote Social and Northcote Theatre, Billboards.
I can't speak to what the scene was like 10 years ago, but to say that its rare feels very wrong to me.
I think the difference might be that, whilst there is still a fair bit on offer if you look closely enough, you now have to look closely enough rather than just being able to stumble upon it.
Same as the 'modern music sucks' argument. Great modern music is there if you do the work, but if you're passive you'll only get the clones of what was popular (via payola) yesterday.
Yeah fair call. I think it is just the vision looking back on what it used to be like.
Same for electronic music in Australia - well off context here but fora such as spraci, ITM, and then its sibling FL were great for discovering and connecting with new music and people.
Praise be to King Gizzard!
There's a venue in NZ called "San Fran" ? That's pretty cool
First it was a massage/sauna place called The San Francisco Bathhouse, and then it kept that name when it turned to a live venue. Now it is just San Fran.
No idea how it looked in New Zealand, but after covid "ended"* there were a lot of people who simply wanted to go out - after spending so much time indoors.
I suspect that people went out more in 2023-2025, but then they reversed to the mean + economic impacts (of money printing everywhere) hit.
* by the way, did covid officially ever end? the new variants seem to be still there, but it just stopped being covered by media after Russia invaded Ukraine)
In New Zealand there were only a few weeks of lockdown followed by much time when people could go out without any fear.
COVID never ended (we chose that). The pandemic turned to an endemic, which is a way of saying that the plan is now natural selection, as everyone will get infected (most people already have been). The death rates have somewhat reduced, but not to the extent that it's as harmless as the cold. Essentially it's now a particularly nastseasonal flu strain. If you're vaccinated, no you aren't, because COVID mutates as fast as any other flu and you last got vaccinated for it years ago.
In the US deaths peaked at >450k in 2021 and then fell <80k in 2023. They have roughly halved each year since (on track for ~10k this year. There are about 30-40k deaths each year due to influenza so this isn't really news any more.
Most everyone is vaccinated except the young who seem to have relatively mild infections. Of course there are probably excess cardiac deaths due to immune response, but that's even smaller and much more difficult to measure or determine cause for.
Did the US reach 450k deaths in a single year? Wow, and there are still those who call it a hoax?
Nothing much to be done about those who refuse free education I guess. I also figure they just have less empathy for their families.
New Zealand locked down less than a lot of countries, but other than people with health problems I see no signs that people aren't going out any more due to Covid.
However due to other reasons people definitely have less money for discretionary activities, especially the youth.
And no, Covid never ended. It's still here, it's still killing and disabling people, but due to vaccines and antivirals it's less prevalent than it was.
What? NZ had one of the strictest, most prolonged and most extreme lockdown regimes in the world. Especially Auckland.
NZ had very strong lockdown but once the country had zero covid there were months of no lockdowns at all.
Other countries had longer lockdowns or even when they didn't people were not going to concerts etc.
Not really.
The international border quarantine was quite extreme, but the rest of the country was (mostly) business as normal.
Yeah, we had a very strict initial lockdown, and closed the border, once the number of cases went to 0 we opened up again, we then had regional lockdowns after cases broke the border quarantine.
Our level 4 lockdown was scored at 95/100 ("extreme") by the Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker. Our border lockdowns and MIQ system were extreme and very prolonged stretching into 2022 and even impacted returning citizens.
Our level 4 lockdown didn't last very long.
The strictness index (which is what I'm assuming you're referring to) varied over time as the response changed.
The claim I was initially responding to was, "New Zealand locked down less than a lot of countries". Not specifically length. NZ lockdown was especially strict in some regards (level 4, border lockdown) and especially prolonged in others (Auckland lockdown, border and MIQ).
The claim meant less time. The lockdown periods in NZ were very short. That's because they actually worked.
we just locked down quick and strict, we then were one of the only places you could go about life relatively normally without too much worry while the rest of the world went through comparatively ineffective lock downs and rrestrictions.
This para is a salutary lesson for all of us:
"This is not a New Zealand quirk. It is the local edge of a global collapse. Pitchfork, the most influential music publication in the world, was folded into GQ in 2024 and its editor-in-chief was laid off. Local music press has been gutted in the US, the UK and Australia. New Zealand just got there first and hardest, because we were small to begin with."
Aotearoa (NZ) has fired up the four way flashers. We ignore it at our peril.
People just don’t go to nearly as many concerts anymore. It all traces back to people are not bored at home anymore because of the internet.
It's not just X, it's Y.
It's not just N, it's Z.
I like that this is bringing out all the kiwi accounts. I've never seen so many of us all in one post. Hey guys! I'm a wannabe software engineer who's in Wellington, I had self-taught myself fairly well until LLMs has made me question if I completely wasted my 20s on what could now be a fools dream. Hope you're all going well!
Always looking for ways to spread community in our recalcitrant people, I'm not sure this is the right direction but it's a goal worth attempting until it works. Well done!
This is probably the place to say if you want to come play in this space you really ought to go to KawaiiCon - AoNZ's kinder/nicer DEFCON - in Wellington over the Halloween weekend, tickets available now, be in before they sell out
I think the content of the article highlights the exact reason why the music died. Large portions of the text are simply a powerpoint presentation with numbers, and stats and percentages and not enough about people enjoying the music.
Yip. I couldn't find anything in it for _me_. It's all about artists talking about artists. The events page has very low res photos which seems amateur.
i used to love going to gigs when i was living in hong kong, didn't find many interesting gigs over here after i moved to auckland 2 years ago. maybe yeah coverage of local gigs is exactly what we need - but seems like the platform is only for DJs. you cited The Beths and general industry decline, then built a platform that's explicitly electronic-only, which falls a bit short
> And yet local artists captured as little as 9 percent of New Zealand streaming, download and physical sales revenue in 2024. In the official end-of-year Top 50 singles chart, exactly one New Zealand track appeared. Radio plays local music, but only two nationwide commercial stations exceeded 20 percent local content.
This seems amazingly high for local content in a small English speaking market, unless that's all just Crowded House.
8% is probably Lorde.
As a New Zealand musician I'd never heard of this, so I got excited for a moment but I see it's only for Electronic music artists, which isn't me. I'm glad someone's trying though.
In 2012 and for a while after, NZ had a government-run website called "The Audience" where any musician could sign up and they'd track listens etc, and the top artists would get actual sponsorship. That was a quite cool idea. The URL is still there with the old logo but it's no longer the same thing.
I really wish it was easier for artists of all types to be seen if their work resonates, regardless of their audience or marketing budget or why they know. I also realise it's kind of an impossible dream; even a perfect analysis algorithm would only shift the power to its creator. Valve seems to be trying quite uniquely hard to do a good job with Steam's discovery system and I appreciate them a lot for that.
Neil, Tim and Lorde need to get together, put on a gig at the basin, live aid style and save nz muso journalism!
Sadly, the AI writing is so terribly distracting.
So the long and short of it seems to be an advertisement for the site itself?
I think this should've been a show HN as your affiliation with the site is not obvious from the outset.
Good luck with your project, but I suspect it will take more than a Claude subscription and a dream to replace what the article claims has been lost.
AI slop article about an extremely niche industry in an irrelevant country? I’ll pass.
What part of this is ostensibly intellectually stimulating because it seems like transparent marketing to me, and poor marketing at that. We don’t need posts for every GoFundMe currently in existence. NZ doesn’t have the population to support something so nice, it’s really that simple lol.
“Put those two facts together and you get the real story. The scene is alive and economically significant, but it has lost its mirror. There is no one left whose job is to tell you what happened at the show last night, which local producer just signed to an overseas label, or why a 34-year-old venue went under owing $692,000.”
As they say, ‘and nothing of value was lost.’
> Propel has published more than 225 articles
Open topic is if anyone is reading those or not.
But decline of quality press & local press is a very big problem.
On another board there is a person who (for free) collects information about people who lost their lives in car accidents during every summer vacation. That person tries to link to articles that described what happened. More and more, there are simply no articles -> because there is no more local press, even a local portal that would write about it.
In a way it's on the people - who dont want to pay for content. Perhaps due to some content shifted to youtube, tiktok or facebook.
I couldn't be more enthusiastic about the local music scene here. But that doesn't mean I'm going to read AI slop about it. If you want to promote the arts, start by using your own words.
I'm almost as tired of complaints about people using AI to write things as I am about people using AI to write things.
> But that doesn't mean I'm going to read AI slop about it. If you want to promote the arts, start by using your own words.
which leads to the next piece of the puzzle, “we lost our quality writers and what we’re doing to get it back.”
there are people who enjoy writing about their passions such as music scenes, tech, arts, maker scenes, etc,.. how do we put them together with the people who are passionate about building something for local music scenes? and no, i don’t think the answer is, “oooh, let’s build another app.”
Didn't you read? All the journalists got laid off. This is what we're left with
They refused to waste the tokens getting their AI agent to summarize it because it was written by someone else's AI agent and is therefore 'lesser'.
Seems to have a very narrow focus in terms of variety of music covered