Spotify is silencing Australian music, but it’s not the only culprit

You might have heard that American pop star Chappell Roan topped Triple J’s Hottest 100 this year. “Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou triplej”, Roan posted on Instagram, as her song Good Luck, Babe! tinkled on thousands of smartphones.

It was another year of the Hottest 100 dominated by international artists. In fact, 2025’s edition had the lowest-ever number of Australian artists: just 18 local acts across the 100 tracks voted on by listeners.

Vance Joy’s Riptide, first released in 2013, was the highest-ranking Australian song on the ARIA 2024 chart.Credit: Cameron Myles

As Thomas Mitchell reported this week, we can’t actually blame Triple J. The national music network still broadcasts plenty of Australian music. It’s just that no one’s listening. Music writer Joe Hardy puts it bluntly: “Australian music is no longer significant in our cultural conversations.”

I grew up in Brisbane in the 1990s, where there was a fertile local music scene in and around Fortitude Valley. Up-and-coming acts like Powderfinger and Regurgitator regularly played local venues to packed crowds. Glory days. But the years when radio icons like Richard Kingsmill could “break” local artists by shoving them onto high rotation on the network are long gone. Triple J is a shadow of its former self, its ratings in freefall. Kingsmill has retired.

A glimpse at the top 40 charts the depth of the crisis. Just five Australian songs made it to the ARIA top 100 for 2024, and the best effort was Vance Joy’s Riptide, which was released in 2013. ARIA chief executive Annabelle Herd sounded almost resigned when she told a music journalist that the result was “unfortunately not new news”.

Chappell Roan topped the 2025 poll of Triple J listeners. Credit: AP

Australian music has been dwindling in popularity for a decade now. Recent analysis by music industry analyst Tim Kelly shows that the percentage of Australian and New Zealand artists in the top 100 single charts declined from an average of 16 per cent from 2000 to 2016, to just 2.5 per cent in 2023. Local albums showed a similar trajectory.

What happened? In a word: Spotify.

Australian audiences have been captured by the global streaming giant. Big American pop stars rule the streams, and local music is suffering.

Industry figures put Spotify at 70 per cent of the Australian audio streaming market. That’s a more dominant market position than even Qantas in Australian aviation. But the Swedish-based platform employs just a handful of workers in its Australian office and serves predominantly international content to Australian ears.

How much Australian content gets played on Spotify is a closely guarded secret. Spotify doesn’t break out country-by-country figures. However, the platform claims it paid more than $275 million in royalties to Australian artists in 2023 and says it supports local musicians through tools like its Spotify for Artists portal.

As a business, Spotify is going gangbusters. According to its third-quarter results, the platform has more than 640 million monthly active users. Global revenues are €15 billion ($25 billion) a year. Spotify tells investors its profit margin on premium subscriptions is above 30 per cent.

Local audiences don’t care. They’re loving the pop songs of the moment – most of which are released by international artists on major labels. Warner, Sony and Universal released 95 per cent of the music on the Australian top-100 charts in 2023. With the big three major labels in the driver’s seat, local tastes are being shaped by a palette of music that leaves Australian music out in the cold.

Spotify is retuning the Australian music market with profound implications for artists like Vance Joy and G Flip. Powderfinger (centre) emerged in the “glory days” before streaming. Credit: Graphic: Matt Davidson

That’s probably why more Australian musicians are packing up and leaving. With the industry increasingly run from LA, it no longer makes sense to toil away in obscurity in Australia. Like our expats of the 1960s, local acts like G Flip and Amyl and the Sniffers are flying out for greener pastures overseas.

Who could blame them? Australian live music was once a nursery for local talent, but live music at your local pub is dying and a once-vibrant festival scene has been crushed by the pandemic, skittish ticket buyers, and skyrocketing production and insurance costs. The one bright spot in the live scene is – you guessed it – tours of big-name international artists, like Taylor Swift.

Live music is also increasingly dominated by overseas multinationals. One of Australia’s most famous music festivals, Splendour in the Grass, is on a two-year hiatus after its American owner Live Nation put the festival on hold. According to organisers, “Splendour needs a little more time to recharge”.

You might be noticing a theme here. Local culture is being swamped by large overseas corporations. The top three video streamers in Australia are foreign-owned Netflix, Amazon and Disney. In December, sports streamer Kayo was sold to London-based billionaire Len Blavatnik. Last week, storied indie book publisher Text was bought by global giant Penguin Random House.

Who’s to blame? Politicians, actually. The great sell-off of local culture is driven by global capital, but it’s been allowed to happen because policymakers have refused to act.

Australia used to have a robust set of laws and regulations that protected local culture. When Kerry Packer controlled a big slice of Australian radio and television in the 1980s, he had to abide by media laws that ensured a large swathe of the content broadcast to Australian audiences was locally made.

But as the internet grew to control our cultural consumption, a generation of lawmakers did nothing. In 2025, no local content rules apply to Spotify or Netflix.

Arts Minister Tony Burke went to the 2022 election promising local content quotas for streaming platforms. While Labor has delivered improved arts funding via the new cultural policy Revive, the streaming quotas haven’t materialised.

The problems of Australian culture can’t be fixed by a few extra grants here and there. Serious intervention in the structure of the cultural economy is needed, to wrest control from the multinationals, and hand it back to local artists and audiences. A 25 per cent local content requirement for all streaming platforms is a good place to start.

Without strong intervention, Australian arts and culture will continue to decline. Good luck, babe.

Dr Ben Eltham is an academic and arts advocate.