The Sputtering Failures of 21st Century Australian Music Journalism

The February edition of Rolling Stone Australia contained its signature ninety page mix of music and politics, as well as a glossy preview of the year ahead. Twenty days later, the 46 year old magazine was dead.

ABC news reported its publisher Paper Riot Pty Limited had gone into receivership on January 24, though the media mourning period was short, almost tokenistic. Rolling Stone Australia even posted its digital content quota on Facebook until January 25th, as if nothing had happened. The final post, a review of the film Molly’s Game, only had two comments, both grumbling about subscription cancellations. A formalised group email to contributors from lawyers detailed the bleak legality of receivership; no writers would be paid. According to contributors, money was owed to a horrific range of people- writers, suppliers, advertisers, and whoever else. The internal picture was the denial of inevitable implosion by Rolling Stone Australia’s upper management. Its demise however isn’t anything new - crippling unsustainability has defined Australian music journalism in the 21st century. A perpetual vacuum seems to exist, created by a lack of funds, support and respect as publications drop in and out. Rolling Stone Australia’s collapse has torn off the stubbornly worn rose-tinted glasses assuring music writers and consumers the once touted rock n’ roll bible would live forever.

Attempting to scrounge together a financially stable career as music journalist is precarious, as the micro-industry is a cultural labour, built on pillars of amateur enthusiasm. But why specifically can’t Australian publications succeed? The U.S. has been able to draw out their own Rolling Stone for the online generation with Pitchfork, interpolating zine culture into a blogging behemoth. The U.K’s strong magazine history built on NME and Melody Maker somewhat weathered the digital storm, while websites like The Quietus have digitally built on their cultural framework. In Australian music journalism, the 21st century has been defined by a feedback loop of failure. The late Rolling Stone Australia hosted the works of two writers, whose polarised careers trace the downward spiral of Australian music journalism this millennium.

***

During the early 1980s, a young Bernard Zuel had a few preoccupations hardly unusual for the hormonal teenage boy: music and girls.

“We had a lot more music than girls,” Zuel laughs gruffly.

He started, like many, with an autodidactic drive to carve out his own authorial view of music, dropping a review of R.E.M’s Fables of the Reconstruction into RAM!, a Sydney based, music magazine in 1985 at the age of 20.

“My style evolved from that in terms of wanting to be someone who can contribute to the story, but not the star of the story; it was about how you could construct something to illuminate,” Zuel recalls over a crackly phone line.

His traditional objective tone suited him well in the beginnings of his career as a Sydney Morning Herald reporter in 1987, after promptly dropping out of law school. Crucially, Zuel’s generation of music journalists received formal training via the institutionalised cadet system. In 1995, Zuel began editing the Friday supplement in the paper, called Metro then, now Shortlist or EG. At the time, music coverage in Fairfax papers was hardly comprehensive, with a meager two album reviews published at the back of the TV guide. Surreptitiously, Zuel added 200 word CD reviews, then agitated for Saturday arts section The Spectrum. For a brief period, 1000 word reviews sat alongside a myriad of music and arts features.

“Those things were all happening as the industry was going through a boom time in the second half of the 90s- newspapers went colour, there were a lot of pages,” Zuel says.

This boom time for music coverage in mainstream Fairfax papers didn’t create any Rolling Stone-esque debauchery, though it did have a now unthinkable freewheeling editorial direction. Zuel recalled how a particularly expensive Kylie Minogue cover was allowed to run, despite its unjustifiable cost.

“My idea was to shoot her in this bed of flowers. Rather than put her in actual dirt and flowers, the stylist and I devised this plan where we had a body shaped on boards, putting flowers through the boards. I had to go into the editors room and explain why I was spending so much money on flowers. They were Gerberas which at the time were fairly expensive- they were like ‘Why can’t you just use daisies or something like that?’ I was sitting there with the most powerful guy at the paper who didn’t really talk to people like me normally, and I was wondering ‘Do I say, cause they’re shit flowers?’ ”

The carefree attitude incrementally vanished over the turn of the century, as the 2000 Sydney Olympics shattered media budgets sending sports writers cross-country and overseas.

“That’s when it became very clear where arts sat in the scheme of things, which was well down the line. As soon as the money started to tighten, that’s when cuts were made,” Zuel says.

Around this time, a freakishly tall young kid from Frankston had started to discover music writing. A ritualistic 90 minute return train trip from the regional centre to grab Rolling Stone off the stands on its monthly release punctuated Marcus Teague’s youth. Writing fascinated Teague, but not in the same fashion as the objective, dictatorial ways of the past.

“A lot of music writing is based on authority I suppose- it’s like I’m right, you’re wrong and this is why this is a great record. What if you could be authoritative about the subjective emotions and experiences?” Teague impassions.

A Machine Translations album review was Teague’s first to hit upon this style, describing how it made him feel as if he were in an “old sunny house in the morning, with dust spiralling through the air”. A man named Danny Bos published it in his online Australian music guide Mono, without caring about its essay length. Bos and Teague formed a kinship, bonding over a desire to “write about the band down the road”, a phrase Teague continually refers to. A beer fueled conversation of starting their own Australian independent music magazine escalated into reality in 2004, when the pair began the bi-monthly magazine Mess+Noise, cobbling together the first issue on Bos’s rental living room floor.

“It was just a thing we did because it was much as part of being in the scene as being in a band. I wanted to play shows and I wanted to see my friends who would go to those shows or make them come to those shows,” Teague remembers.

“Nobody started thinking, oh we should leverage this for money...We thought street press, Rolling Stone, Juke [Magazine] sucked.”

The charming lack of ambition extended to every part of the magazine; bands would send in a scrappy drawing for the back cover, interviews would sprawl needlessly, backgrounded by bizarro advertisements for indie labels. The magazine never had an actual office (briefly renting a space in the Nicholas building) and was completely alien to the commercial reality of “selling” itself.

“Originally it was like literally walking into Polyester Records and seeing if Chris Grouch wanted to buy an ad in the back of the magazine,” Teague chortles.

Despite its successes, Teague couldn’t take the nomadic lifestyle afforded by balancing a role as a pro bono music editor with being a musician. New partners had come into Mess+Noise with intention to monetize it and Teague broke off his relationship in 2007 as the magazine ceased print publication.

“The people that were left essentially sold it and it never really made any money,” Teague laments.

***

Back at Fairfax, Zuel had demoted himself from editor to writer in an attempt to hold onto a semblance of creative fulfillment. Music coverage had slipped between his fingers over the 2000s, as spaces shrank from 1000 words to 800 to 400 to 200 to 150 to a lack of certainty music coverage would run at all each week. Fairfax had just begun its grim decade of cuts, with 550 jobs and editor-in-chief of the Age, Andrew Jaspan, kicked out. Upper management clasped onto the idea 18-35 year olds were a key demographic to secure, but weren’t sure how.

In 2008, Teague received a phone call from The Vine, a brand new arts and culture website. They’d seen his name in the credits at Mess+Noise, loved his work and wanted him to help steer their new site as music editor. To Teague’s shock, they said it was backed by Fairfax.

“They were trying to appeal to people who didn’t buy the paper yet that would grow up and buy a paper. Knowing they had to do something on the internet but not knowing how to reach that crowd,” Teague explains.

The website spanned film, TV, fashion, music and even politics initially, targeting youth cultural pockets through an accessible tone. Though they didn’t know it at the time, The Vine’s tumultuous six year existence would form the prototype for the Australian new media landscape in the 2000s’ new decade. Teague was given free reign to direct an unprecedented vessel for insatiably creative music writing in Australia.

“It was very much the kids at the back of the bus, they didn’t really know what was going on half the time,” Teague remembers.

“How it generally works with papers is PR have relationships with music editors. Music editors are traditionally beholden to that because they have to maintain relationships. Whereas we had power because of Fairfax but we didn’t have to maintain a relationship with anyone. We didn’t have to answer emails, we didn’t have to do anything, because we could do whatever we wanted.”

When The Vine began, it hosted eight full-time staff. One of these staff was a social media manager, something Teague says other Fairfax staff snickered at. The masthead’s lack of understanding of The Vine’s model increasingly wore out the publication.

“Very slowly, we would have a meeting saying, we’ve got to downsize. First the video editor goes, and it’s like oh it’s cool we’ll just get video from Fairfax, then the fashion editor goes and it’s alright we’ll draw in some more content from Fairfax. It got to the point where I was literally the last person there.”

“Suddenly, I got a really big pay-rise” Teague chuckles, swirling a pint glass.

“Management changed and these new people didn’t understand what this tiny little site in the big scheme of Fairfax was doing. They weren’t sure if they wanted to sell it, and then suddenly decided they did. It’s very political at a big organisation like that- the money is in silos. Even though that silo might want you to stay, this other one you’re in doesn’t have the money.”

A new owner, Tom Pitney, bought out the site in 2015, hoping to keep Teague on as the mercurial music editor. Teague was unimpressed.

“[He] sounded like an idiot; he just didn’t know what it was,” Teague says, scratching a tabletop.

Dr Ian Rogers, a senior music industry lecturer at RMIT, found a caveat to The Vine’s success in academic research conducted this year. Fairfax had employed a company to buy web traffic, or send traffic to The Vine from other Fairfax properties. A fine print deal meant this traffic tool would be switched off after a certain period of time, activated on the day of the handover.

“They were saying there was a 50-70 percent drop in traffic overnight. Someone, one of my anonymous sources, came to work and said the office was on fire. People were just fucked, just completely fucked. It was over, it was dead,” Rogers almost cackles.

So where have Teague and Zuel been spat out? Zuel left Fairfax in 2017 amid a decade of mounting pressure from faceless accountants, hoping to retain his generous 25 year payout. The 53 year old does most of his music journalism out of his personal website now, instead subsisting on sporadic media training at Macleay College. Mostly, he’s just glad his wife has a well paid job.

“Australians have never bought into the idea of reading about music, it’s not culturally central in the way it was in the UK and to a lesser extent in the US...In the UK, reading about music was something millions of people did and so those magazines could be sustained,” Zuel says.

Teague vehemently disagrees.

“I think to people in Australia, music fans, it’s still life and death. I think it’s super important to a lot of people, but a lot of people in Australia isn’t much.”

Teague is now the commercial editor at Broadsheet, an online city guide. When I meet him at the Grace Darling Hotel to discuss this piece he arrives early, lamenting a tireless 45 hour working week. He doesn’t write about music currently, simply because he doesn’t even know who he’d write for. At idling moments, he stares down the lip of his pint glass, rarely saying anything he doesn’t need to. When we finish our interview, Teague shakes my head roughly, as he has kept a friend waiting elsewhere. He shifts on his heels, and breathes out.

“I’m not done with writing about music. Not yet.”