While the Big Day Out rages on at Ericsson Stadium, there’s been the announcement of a new “All Kiwi” radio station , Kiwi FM. Taking over the frequency and facilities from Channel Z, the Mediaworks-run Kiwi FM will play all New Zealand music, all the time.
Unless Mediaworks is looking at a business case I don’t know about, the Kiwi FM venture seems flawed in a commercial sense… by aiming to cover all genres, I imagine that the station will find it difficult to attract a stable, defined listenership that will in turn attract advertisers. “Appointment listening” for specialist shows has served public and student radio well, but the variety of people and age groups who want to listen variously to the Decepticonz, Brooke Fraser, Ardijah and Th’Dudes do not seem to constitute a marketable demographic.
Regardless of the commercial prospects for Kiwi FM, our music needs to be presented in a contemporary, international context, and not ghettoised. We need to hear Scribe alongside 50 Cent, and Pluto alongside Coldplay. The way to get NZ music out to the market, out to the music buyers is to put it on the aural shopfloor where people are actually listening.
Kids who like hip-hop/R+B listen to Mai FM, kids who like rock listen to…whatever stations they listen to. NZ music must (and largely has been over the past few years) accepted as a regular part of our music diet, alongside some of the great music being made in other parts of the world. Happily, the voluntary quota system adhered to by most commercial stations in the country appears to be working, with NZ content rates up around a reasonable 20%. This is a very good thing: if NZ radio stations won’t play our music, nobody else will.
For the same reasons, I would also advocate the end of “New Zealand” sections in music shops. (The assumptions behind the “Foreign” section in video shops also annoys me, but that’s the subject of another blog entry).
But this is not to say that NZ music doesn’t require special assistance. Targeted financial incentives for NZ artists are needed, simply because our market is so tiny. Nobody outside New Zealand is going to assist NZ music. We have to put our best foot forward by ourselves, but a “New Zealand Music Radio Station” does not help the cause.
Marketing a record to 4 million potential consumers in Aotearoa is like selling records to just people in West London, or just Sydney, but not Melbourne or Queensland. The reality of the local industry is that the major labels here are often backwater branch offices (often reporting to Sydney), with limited resources to sign NZ artists. As for the independent labels, I know from experience that these guys run on shoestring budgets. Recording grants such as the Phase Four scheme, or a little hand-up to make a video, simply helps get NZ product to the point at which it can be consumed by local listeners and judged alongside overseas product.
I would love to be proved wrong, but I can’t really see how Kiwi FM will assist the cause of the New Zealand music industry. Such a narrow focus could lead to a celebration of mediocrity, marginalisation of local artists and could prove damaging in the long term.
Oh, and speaking of overseas product – tonight, RJD2 and Kid Koala at Galatos – report/review later!
