ARIA’s big change amid Australian music crisis affecting musicians and their success

Australia’s music industry is in crisis, and it has left many homegrown acts affected as they struggle to survive.

Jack River is campaigning to get Aussie music back on the airwaves. Picture: Supplied

Alternative pop artist Jack River has created a beautiful sonic universe for her fans to escape into with her second album Endless Summer.

There are shimmering tunes about the common artistic condition of impostor syndrome (Stranger’s Dream) through to Nothing Has Changed about how the pandemic turned dreams to dust.

Now the acclaimed artist and respected activist, known as Holly Rankin on her passport, has to hope and pray anyone hears it.

The Australian music industry is in crisis as local artists struggle to be heard, their new music shut out of commercial radio broadcast or the most popular streaming playlists.

Holly Rankin, the artist known as Jack River. Picture: Supplied

The lack of airplay for new songs is reflected on the ARIA charts, where most weeks this year there has only been one or two homegrown tracks in the top 50.

That has forced industry body ARIA to change their eligibility criteria for this year’s annual ARIA Awards, otherwise there would hardly be any nominations.

Now ARIA will allow songs and albums to be nominated if they have landed on the Australian artist charts rather than the main top 50.

Rankin and her independent artist peers rely on Triple J airplay – the ABC network’s playlist is 50 per cent all-Australian – to get their new stuff into the ears of music fans.

The lack of airplay for new songs is reflected on the ARIA charts. Picture: Supplied

“The reason I continue to put out an album is I love the experience of creating a world of 10 songs that someone can like dive into and relax into and escape into,” Rankin said.

“Perhaps there may only be a small number of people who are actually going to go on the album journey but I really value them.”

Endless Summer represents four years of work for Rankin. She began making songs with fellow artists including Matt Corby, DMA’s Matt Mason and Genesis Owusu in 2019 as she also became involved in climate action activism and more recently, as an advocate for The Voice to Parliament.

In between her musical and social endeavours, she became pregnant with her first child; daughter Maggie was born earlier this year.

Endless Summerrepresents four years of work for Rankin. Picture: Supplied

And while the music industry gatekeepers struggled to come up with solutions to the airplay impasse – or negotiate successfully with commercial radio and streaming overlords – Rankin got busy.

She launched the Our Soundtrack, Our Stories campaign in 2021 out of her frustration of not hearing Australian songs played during the pivotal medal and performance moments for our athletes at the Tokyo Olympics.

That campaign became an industry-wide initiative and has been a roaring success with not only the TV networks actively programming Aussie songs on their shows, but supermarkets, banks and clothing and alcohol brands committing to back homegrown music.

It is unsurprising Rankin has a raft of big and small ideas to get Aussie music back on the airwaves, from more songs being name-checked and played on podcasts by influential hosts and guests, to calling for the new Federal Government body Music Australia to be given the same resources as Screen Australia.

But for now, she dreams of fans playing the songs of Endless Summer as the soundtrack to their day.