Australian solo indie music producers have relished the time provided by Covid-19 but they still await the opportunity to showcase their new projects.
Covid-19 placed major restrictions everywhere in Australia and has been detrimental to many industries, especially the arts creative industries which is often overlooked by government support.
Hobart based electronic pop producer Chuck Pyecroft, said “Man, I felt pretty good about it.”
“Cause last year I spent a lot of time in my studio writing heaps of stuff and getting a lot of time to focus on what I actually want to put out without any outside influence.”
Given the circumstances of last year forcing people to spend more time at home, producers had more time to work on projects. It was extremely beneficial to producers, but has been awful for gigs, bands, and networking.
Pyecroft stated that it has become impossible to perform and network through gigs. Venues stopped running weekly gigs that artists could consistently play at, preventing them from connecting with other artists.
“Consistently playing live music is super important for building a following and getting people to know who you are and when people know who you are you get more and better gig opportunities, so it kind of snowballs”, Pyecroft said.
Melbourne based producer and Majula bassist Nicholas Daley said that they are holding off on releasing an album as they would lose out on an enormous amount of content as without live shows, artists lose valuable promotional content such as videos and photos.
‘We were just getting started with the new album we had just done like we could have released it, but we wanted to release it alongside shows and actually kind of get the ball rolling in that regard in promoting ourselves’, said Daley.
Pyecroft foresees the future of the music industry as being on new platforms such as Twitch, which has proven successful for other Hobart artists.
Daley expressed that Bandcamp has been his favourite outlet for posting the band’s media, an all-in-one site for merch and music where people can outright pay for music as opposed to the minimal profit streaming provides.
Live shows are slowly returning with larger artists beginning to set up and perform in smaller shows, but until the Covid-19 vaccine rollout is fully completed, large scale shows cannot go ahead.
Daley’s final words are to get involved in live performances as soon as you can,
“There’s just so many people that are getting employed along the way and without those, the show doesn’t go on and they’ve been out of a job for a long time, so get into it.”
Images: Jacob Collings and Alex Phugh-Harris.
