I interviewed Brendan Smyth from New Zealand On Air yesterday when I met him at The Great Escape in Brighton, and we talked about how hearing local music on commercial radio contributes to a sense of identity and nationhood.
Sadly, I lost a good deal of the recorded interview thanks to a technical cock-up, but I was able to retrieve quite a lot of it. As he put it:
Why is it important that we get more New Zealand music played on the radio? I guess there are several answers to that, one of which is that it is important for the strength or robustness of the local culture that when you turn on the radio you get to hear music made by New Zealanders – and you’re not constantly bombarded with American or British music which is kind of almost like a cultural imperialism.
So from that point of view, it’s important for a robust local music culture, and economy for that matter. That there is a good representation of local music on the airwaves.
But I think probably if you go deeper than that into people feeling good, feeling passionate because they identify with the music, they identify with the artists, all New Zealanders love New Zealanders doing well – whether it’s the All Blacks, or Michael Campbell playing golf. Whenever a New Zealander does well, locally or internationally – especially internationally – New Zealanders just love it. It’s self-affirming and gives people a sense of pride.
I mean, these are all cliches really, but it’s very real that sense of pride that we feel in our own doing well. Particularly on the international stage. And I guess it’s all part of that, you know? If you turn on the radio, and you hear a lot of New Zealand music, then you identify with that music, you feel proud about that music…
From an economic point of view, you get to like the music, you get to buy the music (however you buy it…), you get to go to the gigs – but you also get to feel a sense of pride in it.
So I guess it’s all of those reasons.
I suspect the theme of prioritising the cultural feeding into the commercial benefit will crop up a lot as I do this. That seems to be true of a lot of aspects of popular music culture… but that’s something I’ll come back to.
