ARIA Hall of Fame inductees Crowded House headline 2016 awards

The ARIA Awards will be held in Sydney next Wednesday featuring this year’s leading nominee Flume.

Jessica Mauboy will perform at this year’s ARIA Awards in Sydney. Picture: Richard Dobson

As the sleeps countdown to this year’s ARIA Awards reaches single figures, tension is mounting at the prospect of so many performers jostling for position at the ceremony in Sydney next Wednesday. It’s an impressive list put together by the organisers to mark the 30th anniversary of the event, led by Hall of Fame inductees Crowded House and featuring this year’s leading nominee Flume alongside an all-Aussie cast including Missy Higgins, the Veronicas, Troye Sivan, Bernard Fanning, Vera Blue, Violent Soho, Jessica Mauboy, Illy and Jimmy Barnes — with more still to be announced and Robbie Williams among the presenters. Given the occasion of looking back over the event’s 30 years it’s probably easy to guess which songs some of them will be performing — I’m looking at you, Farnsy — but one wonders if there will be an opportunity for them to join forces at the end of the show for a spirited ensemble reading of an Aussie classic. And what classic could they turn to? Looking back through the history of single of the year/song of the year, it’s a tough call picking a song that would suit Barnsey and Illy and Missy. 5SOS’s She Looks So Perfect maybe? Or Powderfinger’s The Day You Come? Yothu Yindi’s Treaty, song of the year in 1992, would be an obvious good choice but that was done at another awards ceremony a few years back. Maybe everyone will be in too much of a rush to get to the afterparties to worry about a grand singalong at the end. We’ll see.

Once 30 years of Australian wonderfulness has been celebrated at the ARIAs, certain members of the local industry will be turning their focus to quite different matters, such as where to find the best caipirinha in Sao Paulo. Well, not exactly, but we are sending a trade delegation to South America in a couple of weeks, one with a distinctly musical flavour. The sexily titled Australian Music Industry South American Trade Mission will see a posse of promoters, managers, record company executives and publishers travel to Chile, Argentina and Brazil to attend music industry events there in the hope of building business alliances between those countries and our own. The trip is the initiative of industry trade body Sounds Australia, which promotes Aussie music across the globe at events such as Canadian Music Week and SXSW in Texas every year. The visit, which begins at the Fluvial industry conference and showcase in Valdivia, Chile on November 30, is supported by the federal government through the Australian Cultural Diplomacy Grant Plan and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. SD made the point to Sounds Australia representatives that such a delegation would be well served by a music journalist of a certain age and experience with a keen thirst — for South American culture — as part of the operation. That’s as far as the conversation went.

Sad to see music among the victims of this week’s cull at Radio National, which has cut its music programming greatly in favour of “attracting broader audiences with engaging, appealing content”. That would be audiences with no interest in music, presumably, an elite group if ever there were one. This will be a significant blow to Aussie indie artists whose only radio outlet is the national broadcaster. Let’s hope it’s temporary.