Mapping the music infrastructure in Aotearoa

General
1

In Aotearoa, musicians are mostly dependent on the same handful of corporate intermediaries and DataFarming platforms as they are in many other countries. I have some ideas about what we could do about that, using existing tech and a bit of community organising. But before I get into that I think it’s important to follow what I call the Kalashnikov Principle, and map out what kiwi music-makers are currently using. As well as local organisations and platforms whose members might be keen to support new initiatives, or even get involved in bootstrapping them.

Organisations

  • Audio Foundation: “We believe in independent and adventurous visions, creative engagement, and critical enquiry in sound, music, and related practices. The Audio Foundation is a dedicated and professional space to support, promote, and preserve these practices in Aotearoa/NZ.”

  • Aotearoa Music Industry Collective: An industry trade group promoting services to musicians.

  • APRAAMCOS: A truly terrifying acronym for the Australasian royalty collections organisations. Keen champions of local music, who run the Silver Scroll awards for songwriting. Nut somewhat risk averse and arguably dominated by partisans of the legacy recording and distribution industries (local branches of major labels, commercial music radio, etc). Eg strong antipathy to any use of CreativeCommons licenses for music when CC A/NZ when getting started, at least beyond hobbyist experiments.

  • Independent Music Venues Aotearoa: Alliance of independent music venues across the country

  • Music Managers Forum Aotearoa: An “independent non-profit trade association” for music managers in Aotearoa, at all levels. Affiliated to International Music Managers’ Forum (IMMF).

  • NZ Music Commission - Te Reo Reka o Aotearoa: A publicly-funded coordinating body for the NZ music industry.

  • Recorded Music NZ

  • Women About Sound: A support network for women musicians in Aotearoa.

Portal sites, Music Magazines and Ticketing Platform

(Note: this section is really about music community building; promotion, reviews, etc. Ticketing platforms might belong with labels and studios, or in another section?)

  • AAA Ticketing: A privately owned ticketing platform that mostly handles theatre tickets, but sometimes bigger touring music events. Creating an account is a bit painful, asks for an address (none of their business, at least you can enter whatever you want) and requires running JavaScript from domains controlled at least 2 US DataFarming companies.

  • AmbientNZ: “A directory of New Zealand ambient music”

  • AudioCulture: A publicly-funded archive of kiwi music history with photos, cover and post art, and links to online versions of studio and live recordings.

  • Big City: A music portal for the city of Ōtautahi/ Christchurch, with music news, interviews, recording and live shows reviews with live photos, and directories of artists, venues, studios and labels

  • Cosmic Ticketing: A ticket-selling platform started by a chain of head shops called Cosmic (formerly Cosmic Corner)

  • Elsewhere.co.nz: A portal for writing on music and the arts by Graham Reid.

  • Gremlins.nz: “You can use this platform to find and share all the dope art, music, poetry, events, and goings on in Ōtautahi.”

  • Hamilton Underground Press: A music blog based in Hamilton/ Kirikiriroa since 2015. The genesis of the HTown wiki.

  • HTown wiki (currently down, but I have it on good authority the content has been backed up and there are plans to revive it): A MediaWiki instance used to document local music history Hamilton/ Kirikiriroa. Originating from a thread on the now defunct local music forum htown.co.nz/.

  • Libel.co.nz: “Libel Music was one of New Zealand’s first online ‘Independent Music Mags/Blogs’ dedicated to audio-culture music, theatre, art & the entertainment industry founded in August 2005 … Operating as a Collaborative …”

  • Muzic.nz: A portal with music news, reviews, and interviews, photos, and artist and industry directories, launched in 1999, and affiliated with the Aotearoa Music Industry Collective

  • NZ Musician: A long-running free trade magazine for the NZ music industry

  • Obscure.co.nz: A portal site for underground rave culture in Aotearoa since the mid-1990s.

  • Rip It Up/ Real Groove (defunct): Two of the longest-running local music magazines, covering both local and international artists. Rip It Up was a paid mag, sold in shops and by subscription. Real Groove was a vanity publication of the Real Groovy chain of record stores, distributed free of charge in shops, cafes, etc. After Rip It Up folded, they briefly tried to fill that niche, but this pivot failed and they too went under. I mention this to highlight the importance of music mags and the challenges they face in the digital era.

  • Sounds Good - Gig guide for musical events in Ōtautahi (Christchurch), possibly affiliated with the student radio station RDU 98.5?

  • Under the Radar: A longstanding ad-supported kiwi music portal with sections for music news, features articles, a gig guide, live photos, tracks (akin to old school singles), and ticket sales

Record Stores

Those that survive in 2026, listed south to north;

Ōtautahi/ Christchurch

Te Whanganui-a-Tara/ Greater Wellington

Kirikiriroa/ Hamilton

Tamaki Makaurau/ Auckland

Music Labels, Recording Studios and Tour Promoters

Early Label history from Te Papa Tongarewa (national museum)

More examples in RNZ The Sampler’s radio program on “microlabels”.

Historical

Regular Music Festivals

Unless otherwise mentioned these are independent events, owned by the company, not-for-profit or collective that runs them.

  • Electric Avenue: now owned by SlaveNation.

  • Homegrown: A one-day, multi-stage events featuring well known kiwi bands, both new and old. As of 2026, held in Kirikiriroa/ Hamilton, after years of being held on the waterfront of Te Whanganui-a-Tara in Wellingon city.

  • Ignition: Burning Man regional event, with some sound camps(?), held in Waikato, near Matamata

  • KiwiBurn: Burning Man regional event, with some sound camps, held near Hunterville, a few hours north of the capital city Te Whānganui-a-Tara/ Wellington

  • Laneway

  • Rolling Hertz: Multi-day outdoor rave (“bush doof”) held in Mohua/ Golden Bay, near Takaka

  • Splore (defunct as of 2026): a multi-day bands and DJs festival featuring both major commercial acts and lesser known, often local ones, held at Tāpapakanga Regional Park near Tamaki Makaurau/ Auckland

  • Shipwrecked: Multi-day outdoor rave, held in “Port o Te Ārai”, north of Tamaki Makaurau/ Auckland

  • Twisted Frequency (as of 2026, 2027 will be their last year): Mainly a multi-day outdoor rave (“bush doof”), held in Mohua/ Golden Bay, near Takaka, with a wide variety of DJs, but also some live bands, playing on 4 24/7 stages. The Twisted homepage has a curated directory of music organisations.

  • Yatra: Multi-day outdoor rave, held in Mohua/ Golden Bay, near Takaka (yes, there’s a bunch of these in this part of the country!)

  • WOMAD: A multi-day event featuring world music, the local incarnation of the international World of Music and Dance festival held in the Bowl of Brooklyn in New Plymouth, Taranaki.

Other Regular Music-Related Events

Independent Music Radio

  • Student Radio Network (formerly bNet, see this 2013 article in NZ Musician): Loose association of student radio stations in the major cities, most of which also release their shows as podcasts, heavily featuring local and independent music. Stations include (south to north);

  • Community Access Media Alliance: A network of community access stations around the country, which also operates the AccessRadio NZ podcasting infrastructure for shows from members stations. Many of these host music shows of various kinds, like Deep InSessioNZ. These include (south to north):

    • PlainsFM
    • FreshFM
    • FreeFM

  • LPFM (Low Power FM) stations: Under NZ broadcasting regulations, the “guard band” areas at their end of the commercially licensed FM spectrum are reserved for community use with low-power radio transmitters. This includes utility functions, like in-car transmitters that broadcasting from digital music player to car stereos with no USB or other input sockets. But also small, unlicensed radio stations, including some broadcasting music, like BaseFM and GeorgeFM. A LPFM society was set up to advocate for the interests of LPFM stations around the country, although it’s unclear if the society is still active, or if any of the stations whose operators helped start it are still broadcasting.

Corporate Intermediaries

The platforms we’re aiming to replace with community-driven efforts.

  • Axar Capital (formerly LiveStyle)/ BeatPort: A number of electronic and hip hop acts in Aotearoa have their tunes on BeatPort.

  • BrandCramp: Most kiwi independent artists promote and sell their music on BC, even those releasing music under CC licenses. Generally the only time kiwi music can’t be found there is if a corporate label owns the rights, and refuses to allow the artist to sell their own music directly to fans.

  • FarceBook: A high proportion of kiwis regularly use a FB account to manage their social lives, or other Meta platforms like Mess-injure, InstaGrab, and WhatSapp. So like most kiwis running public events, people promoting live music shows and festivals, are heavily dependent on FB for building buzz and getting details about shows out to the people who might go.

  • Reddit: Kiwi music communities used to have web forums, attached to independent sites like punkas.com (which seems to have died in 2025, and the forums well before). Now they mostly have subreddits and FB groups.

  • SlaveNation/TicketMonster/Moshtix: As of 2026, this conglomerate has been on a buying spree in Aotearoa, buying up both live music venues and festivals. The current government seems happen to provide public funding to SlaveNation properties, while starving homegrown venues and events of funding.

  • Sony/ SME (Sony Music Entertainment)/ Epic Records/ Columbia Records/ RCA/ BMG/ The Orchard/ ATV music publishing: One of 3 corporate music giants (along with Vivendi and Warner) that between them own the majority of music publishing and distribution worldwide, including a significant stake in Spitify, although this has been diulted over time.

  • Spitify: A corporate streaming platform that does exactly what Napster was accused of doing - making bank off giving audiences access to other people’s music - but with the blessing of the corporate music industry, many of whom own a stake of it, and make most of the money paid to “rights-holders”. Another corporate extractor with an ownership stake is TenCent, owner of WeChat.

  • Ticketake/Eventopia/EventFinda: Ticketek is an Australian ticketing company, and along with TicketMonster, forms a duopoly that controls the majority of the ticketing for live events in Aotearoa. Although independent ticketsellers exist, like Under the Radar and Cosmic Ticketing, they’re used only by small and staunchly independent events. Similarly, EventFinda forms an online event promotion duopoly with FB.

  • Vivendi/ Universal Music/ Virgin/ Republic Records/ EMI /See Tickets/ PayLogic: One of 3 corporate music giants (along with Sony and Warner) that between them own the majority of music publishing and distribution worldwide, including a significant stake in Spitify, although this has been diulted over time.

  • Warner Music Group (majority owned by Russian oligarch and oil billionaire Len Blavatnik): One of 3 corporate music giants (along with Sony and Vivendi) that between them own the majority of music publishing and distribution worldwide, including a significant stake in Spitify, although this has been diulted over time.

1 Like
Getting more kiwis into the mix here
2

Obviously I’m just getting started here. This is just my crack at it, mostly off the top of my head, and adding stuff I found or was reminded on while web searching. Lots more entries, links, and details to be added. @AmbientSpace probably has heaps more ideas of what could be added, and maybe corrections to what I’ve got here so far. As might any other kiwis lurking on the forum, or stumbling across this some other way.

Hey @admins, can we move this into the Knowledge Base and make it a wiki, so anyone can edit it? For now, if you’ve got anything to add, chuck it in a comment, and I’ll do my best to integrate it.

EDIT: One of the advantages of following the Kalashnikov Principle is that more often that not, you realise in the process that at least some of the work you were setting out to do has already been done. For example, a number of the portal sites I’ve already listed here have directories on them. Rather than making this list a novel, what I can do is link to those directories under the appropriate subheading, and individually list only the items that are missing from them all, or particularly notable.

2 Likes
3

This is really cool @strypey thanks for sharing!

We were just discussing in Mirlo that really what we see as the way forward for building an alternative music economy is a focus on local and decentralization along those lines. I think doing an inventory of this scale would be really helpful and I should personally do one for D.C. with the handful of people who are here. It’s an interesting idea to do that on this forum honestly.

Aside: also I just worked on implementing location tagging on Mirlo, and one of the thing I noticed is that we have a handful of musicians in so called New Zealand who used Aotearoa but I didn’t want to retroactively change their tag to include New Zealand. Trying to think through that a bit more.

1 Like
Geographical tagging and decolonisation
4

Glad you found it useful. Thanks to the folks who set up this forum for giving me a place to collect this info, and the inspiration to do so.

I heartily encourage you to have a go at doing the same for your local area. I’m learning heaps by doing this one. Eg today I found libel.co.nz, which has existed for over 20 years, and I’d never heard of it! I’ve already found a number of sites with gig guides, and I’m thinking about how the ActivityPub federation used by Mobilizon and Gancio could be used to link them together, and automate a lot of the data gathering they currently do manually. Allowing them to collectively gather a lot more, and get it out to more places it can be discovered.

This relates to something I’ve been thinking about a lot, especially since the pandemic lockdowns; how did the net somehow became the answer to every question?

  • How do we distribute our music? Put it online!
  • How do we promote it? Post on social media!
  • How do we build a musical community? Set up an online forum somewhere!

Substitute whatever you like for music (film, political messages, etc), the dynamic is the same.

In the 90s, the net seemed like the solution to a real problem we had; bricks’n’mortar space was getting increasingly expensive and difficult to access, and helping people find the spaces we did manage to carve out seemed hard (in hindsight I’m not sure it was as hard as we thought but …). The net, and particularly the web, was a way to create massive spaces for ourselves and our communities, fairly cheap. As well as to hang out a shingle for our venues, studios, practice rooms, social centres, etc. So we all piled in, and then the sociopaths followed us here to mine us for various kinds of capital.

There’s a saying that we’re always fighting the last war. From what I observe, most of our communities are acting like it’s still the 90s, even though the situation has totally reversed. We now pay through the nose for bandwidth and hosting, either in money, or in our personal information and freedom of action. Meanwhile so much of our built environmental is abandoned and rotting, even in cities with property prices ludicrously inflated by decades of speculation and capital gains mining.

I’m not arguing for abandoning the net. That would be over-correcting, and a mistake for the same reason that abandoning shared physical spaces has been a mistake. But I suspect we have the same opportunity now to seize and occupy ground in material space that we had in the 90s to seize it in cyberspace. This is one of the solutions Hahko’ McFarlane wrote about in a series of posts on rebuilding music communities in Aotearoa in 2022. Again, I think the underlying principles can be applies to a lot of things, particularly other creative communites.

5

Hey @defaultmediatransmitter, I seem to have lost the ability to edit the OP here. Can you please make it into a wiki page, so I can keep editing it?

I have entries to add to the Corporate Intermediaries section;

  • Axar Capital (formerly LiveStyle)/ BeatPort: A number of electronic and hip hop acts in Aotearoa have their tunes on BeatPort.

  • Sony/ SME (Sony Music Entertainment)/ Epic Records/ Columbia Records/ RCA/ BMG/ The Orchard/ ATV music publishing: One of 3 corporate music giants (along with Vivendi and Warner) that between them own the majority of music publishing and distribution worldwide, including a significant stake in Spitify, although this has been diulted over time.

  • Spitify: A corporate streaming platform that does exactly what Napster was accused of doing - making bank off giving audiences access to other people’s music - but with the blessing of the corporate music industry, many of whom own a stake of it, and make most of the money paid to “rights-holders”. Another corporate extractor with an ownership stake is TenCent, owner of WeChat.

  • Vivendi/ Universal Music/ Virgin/ Republic Records/ EMI /See Tickets/ PayLogic: One of 3 corporate music giants (along with Sony and Warner) that between them own the majority of music publishing and distribution worldwide, including a significant stake in Spitify, although this has been diulted over time.

  • Warner Music Group (majority owned by Russian oligarch and oil billionaire Len Blavatnik): One of 3 corporate music giants (along with Sony and Vivendi) that between them own the majority of music publishing and distribution worldwide, including a significant stake in Spitify, although this has been diulted over time.

6

I’ve clicked on “make wiki” and “enable shared edits”. I hope that fixes it.

1 Like
7

Thanks for that @defaultmediatransmitter , it has indeed! :smiley:

EDIT: updating the page I curate on CC-licensed kiwi music has surfaced lots of new info to add.