Another BIGSOUND done. My voice is wrecked, my shoes smell like Fortitude Valley at 3am, and I’ve got a notebook full of scribbled observations that I’m now trying to make sense of.

The conference has always been a weird mix of genuine industry insight and corporate theatre. This year felt like the balance shifted slightly toward the genuine side, which was refreshing. Here’s what actually mattered.

The Panels Worth Attending

The standout session was “Streaming Is Not a Strategy,” run by former ARIA executive turned independent manager Rachel Keane. She walked through real P&L data from three different release campaigns — a major label pop act, a mid-tier indie rock band, and a bedroom producer with a TikTok following.

The numbers were sobering. The major label act spent $180,000 on marketing and recouped about $60,000 from streaming in year one. The indie band spent $8,000 and made $12,000. The bedroom producer spent essentially nothing and made $45,000, mostly from sync licensing deals that came through a viral moment.

Keane’s conclusion was blunt: “Streaming is a distribution method, not a business model. If your revenue strategy starts and ends with streams, you’re already in trouble.”

The AI panel was predictably packed. I’ll say this — it was less hype-filled than last year’s version. The conversation focused more on practical tools (stem separation, mastering assistance, metadata tagging) and less on whether AI will replace musicians entirely. The answer, for now, is obviously no.

Showcase Highlights

I saw about fifteen showcases across three nights. A few that stuck with me:

Mala Vista from Sydney played a blistering set at The Brightside that mixed post-punk energy with Arabic-language lyrics. They’re doing something genuinely different, and the room knew it. By the third song, the venue was at capacity with people queued outside.

Jess Ribeiro continues to be one of the most underrated artists in Australia. Her set at The Foundry was stripped back and devastating. If you haven’t listened to her latest record, fix that immediately.

Kinder from Melbourne brought their maximalist synth-pop to a tiny room at Ric’s Bar and somehow made it work. The contrast between the enormous sound and the intimate venue created something special.

The Industry Trends

A few recurring themes from my conversations with managers, label people, and booking agents:

Live music recovery is uneven. Venues in capital cities are mostly booking well, but regional touring is still struggling. Several managers told me they can’t make the numbers work for anything outside the east coast capitals right now. Fuel costs, accommodation, and the death of several regional venues during COVID have created lasting gaps.

Sync licensing is the new priority. Almost every manager I spoke to mentioned sync as a growing revenue focus. Film, TV, advertising, and video games are all hungry for Australian music, and the rates are substantially better than streaming. One manager described sync income as “the difference between my artists having day jobs and not.”

Festival lineups are consolidating. The same twenty acts appeared on multiple festival lineups announced at BIGSOUND. That’s not new, but the concentration feels more intense than previous years. Smaller festivals are struggling to compete for headliners, which pushes them toward more adventurous programming — which, honestly, often makes for better festivals.

What Was Just Noise

The Web3 music contingent has thankfully shrunk to a single panel, down from about six last year. NFT music platforms continue to exist in a parallel reality where anyone cares.

Several “industry disruption” panels felt like startups pitching VCs rather than offering useful insight to musicians. If your panel requires a disclaimer that you’re the CEO of the company being discussed, maybe reconsider the format.

The networking events sponsored by major platforms felt increasingly performative. Free drinks are nice, but a forty-minute wait for a cocktail while listening to a Spotify executive talk about “artist empowerment” tested my patience.

The Verdict

BIGSOUND remains essential if you’re working in Australian music. Not because every session is brilliant — plenty aren’t. But because the informal conversations between sessions, the chance encounters at showcases, and the concentrated presence of the entire industry in one suburb for three days create opportunities that don’t exist elsewhere.

The Australian music industry has real structural problems. Venue closures, streaming economics, cost-of-living pressures on artists, and the ongoing challenge of being a small market at the bottom of the world. BIGSOUND won’t solve these problems. But it’s one of the few places where people are at least talking about them honestly.

See you in Fortitude Valley next September.