One of the standouts of BIGSOUND 2025 so far has been First Word: One Brilliant Thing, the “captains of industry” panel discussion that kicked off proceedings for the week.
The session gathered ARIA/PPCA CEO Annabelle Herd; Jaddan Comerford, UNIFIED Music Group founder & CEO; Josh Simons, CEO of Vinyl Group, publishers of Rolling Stone AU/NZ; and Dan Rosen, President of Warner Music Group Australasia; for an hour-long exploration of the domestic industry, the complex evolutions happening behind the scenes, the hot-button topics and more.
Rosen connected the dots, comparing our giant-killing athletes with our powerhouse artists, from Amyl and the Sniffers to Tame Impala, and stadium fillers Dom Dolla and Rüfüs Du Sol.
It’s not a “perfect example,” he explained of the Olympics comparison, but it “does show that with intention, with “focusing our strengths, focusing as an industry, working together, that we can win to get more artist opportunities? We’d love to sit back at BIGSOUND in three years and we’ve become a top five export market, because the opportunity is massive.”
For the first time this year, Australia got bumped from the IFPI’s top ten market rankings, despite the market posted solid year-on-year growth. Don’t read too much into that, Rosen continued. “We are going to be limited by how much we can grow Australia at 26 million people, in a streaming market and a live market. There’s only so much we can grow. But there’s no limit to how we can grow globally. So that will be, I think, a good guide, because if we get to top five, that will mean more artists putting more releases in the world.”
Facilitator Neil Griffiths, Rolling Stone AU/NZ’s Editor-In-Chief, invited Herd to speak first. The ARIA chief obliged and delivered the killer line for this year’s conference when she confessed, “I don’t mind going first. I like seeing women lead.
Herd gave the audience a walk through the new-look ARIA Charts, which from Friday, September 5th will separate those releases that are two years old, or more, from the weekly frames.
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“We did it because we want dynamism back in the chart,” she explained. “We want it to be exciting for the public to check this out. We want to give artists tools to be able to promote their music and to hold up a lovely red No. 1 on the Australian charts or you, or No. 1 on the main chart. It’s a really great opportunity for an artists and their team to get out there and say, ‘oh my God look at our success’. We want people to do that.”
Comerford pointed out that many young music fans don’t know, or don’t care, about the origin of their favourite tunes. There’s a green-and-gold opportunity dangling.
“There is a conversation that we can be having every day with every person we talk to, and it might seem insane, but what’s better than talking about music?,” he remarked. “That’s all I talk about. So why not talk about that too baristas, people at the gym or wherever it is that you spend your time. I know I might seem small, but these things do add up and it can turn the tide.”
Conversation turned to AI, how the “class of 2010” was lost in the seachange of social media, and the long road to artist development, one that took four or five albums for INXS to upgrade from pubs in Perth to Wembley Stadium.
“This industry would be bolder, bigger, more rich for all of us, and satisfying, I think, if some of the negativity, there’s not a lot of it, but some of it was done away with and we could put to bed the gatekeeper shit,” remarked Simons. “When we work together, great things happen.”
Comerford, who recently expanded his business into India, the world’s most populous country, and whose consumers collectively wield some 800 million smartphones, had the last world.
“At the beginning of this year, I wrote about my themes for 2025. So I’ll leave these with you to reflect on: build community, celebrate music and stay positive. And I think that’s what we need to do. We need to come together as an industry. We need to acknowledge the challenges, but we need to be positive. We need to support each other. And it’s awesome to feel so much positively from this panel, it’s so easy to fall into the negativity of the world. The music is awesome, Australian music is awesome, our industry is awesome.”
Produced by QMusic, the 2025 edition of BIGSOUND wraps up Friday.
