F**K festivals

Festivals are killing music. TripleJ knows this and yet it promotes festivals like the Catholic church promotes the Stations of the Cross. TripleJ promotes festivals because it has to. There just ain't enough venues for the thousands of bands being hyped by TripleJ and TripleJ Unearthed. Each week Unearthed spews out another "amazing" or "awesome" featured artist. That's 52 new bands a year looking for gigs. Where are they gonna play? There are already thousands of established artists struggling to get into these rooms. The new kiddies can play at the festivals, of course! Festivals can put 52 acts on the bill and no one will give a toss whether any of them are any good because - let's face it - no one goes to festivals to listen to the music. You go to festivals to hook up/or and get shit-faced.

Trouble is, some of the festivals are already folding. The market is saturated. The festivals have become bloated Disneyworlds, where music is just the background, the excuse for spending ten hours of enforced intimacy with 5000 dickheads you would normally cross the road to avoid.

No musician wants to play festivals. Unless they're headlining, of course. Festivals are not about music, they are about big crowds. Punters aren't there to listen to bands, they are there because they can move from one act to the next when they get bored. If you want to listen to a band, you go to the band's gig. But, of course, the gigs are drying up too.

TripleJ has now started a campaign (SLAM) to get people out to gigs. The promotional vox-pops feature kiddies talking about how "amazing" it is to see musicians up close and raw, unassisted by their studio production team. Wow. Who'd a thought it?

Of course, live music goes on in venues seven nights a week across the country. Masterful musicians are at work in bars and clubs and concerts all over the place - but TripleJ listeners would never get to hear of any of these performers. Because they aren't fashionable. They aren't on TripleJ. Chicken and egg.

What TripleJ listeners get to hear - and hear lots of - are the fashionable bands. TripleJ loves them. TripleJ loves Snakadaktal and San Cisco and Cloud Control and Tame Impala because they have the look - whatever this month's look happens to be. As for musicianship? Who gives a shit. TripleJ is not about music: it's about what's in fashion. Change the fashions fast enough and you solve the "too many bands on the circuit" problem. Last month's darlings are replaced by the next big thing before you can say "indie". And who cares which indie acts are on the bill at festivals anyway? They are all the same.

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