Let me tell you about $300.

$300 is what the average independent musician earns from streaming in a year. Not a bad month - a year.

For music played daily in cafés and cars and bedrooms and workplaces across the country.

Douglas Adams once wryly observed that the major difference between something that might go wrong and something that cannot possibly go wrong is that when something that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair. The architecture of major streaming platforms is a little like this.

The Pack is built outside that architecture. 70 cents of every subscription dollar goes straight to the independent Aussie artists YOU actually listened to this month.

We're crowdfunding to launch. Help us get there. https://crowdfunding.startsomegood.com/thepackmusiccoop

#ThePackMusic #MusicIsWork #IndependentArtists #AustralianMusic

🇦🇺 Nick Cave "Idiot Prayer" – 2020

A stark and intimate solo performance recorded at Alexandra Palace. Stripped entirely to voice and piano, the album revisits material from across Cave’s catalogue in a deeply personal and recontextualised form...

#nickcave #NickCaveandtheBadSeeds #pianomusic #livealbum #alternativerock #singersongwriter #australianmusic #vinylcommunity #vinyl #music #vinylrecords #nowspinningonvinyl #nowspinning #nowlistening

Two numbers that don't really belong in the same sentence: $5,000. That is the total government funding The Pack Music Co-operative has received across five years and more than twenty grant applications.$420 million. That is the projected annual direct payment to unsigned Australian artists under a proposed government-backed music streaming scheme.

The distance between those two numbers is not a 'start-up' funding gap. It is a government policy choice. It's a decision, made repeatedly and across multiple government institutions, about which parts of the music ecosystem are worth investing in.

The maths of building a musician-owned streaming platform from scratch, in the country with some of the strongest streaming consumption per capita in the world, is genuinely strange.

This blog breaks down why the numbers our government has found via its own research should be the ones making the argument for The Pack.

👉 https://www.packmusic.au/blog/howstreamingsavedlocalmusic

#MusicPolicy #ArtsFunding #IndependentMusic #ThePackMusic #AustralianMusic #MusicIndustry #MusicEconomics #StreamingRoyalties

I want to make a plain argument for backing The Pack - not as a goodwill gesture, but as an investment in structural change with measurable potential return.

The problem is documented: independent Australian musicians earn almost nothing from streaming. Government funding is capped and competitive. The current architecture will not fix itself.

The solution draws on approaches that have been tested and validated: user-centric payment models, local discovery infrastructure, democratic cooperative governance.

We've built them into the architecture from the ground up. The market demand is documented: 42% of music-engaged Australians would pay for an Australian-only platform.

At the most conservative adoption scenario, The Pack generates $152.84M annually in direct artist payments and sector development. An order of magnitude more than all State and Commonwealth music funding combined.

The ask of our community is just $45,000. The potential return - economic, cultural, structural - is genuinely large. Can you support us?

https://crowdfunding.startsomegood.com/thepackmusiccoop

#ImpactInvestment #AustralianMusic #SocialEnterprise #CulturalInvestment

Something happens in a room when the music is local and the person behind the counter knows who made it.

Music that was previously texture becomes something you can have an opinion about, follow up on, go to the gig. The music stops being wallpaper and starts being part of the experience.

The Pack's business subscription will make that available to any business that plays music — and to ensure the artist is fairly paid for it.

There are approximately 100,000 businesses in Australia with OneMusic licensing. For $50/month, a Pack business subscription means the music in your venue generates direct payments to local Australian artists.

We're also building direct artist tipping, venue-specific playlists, and patron participation features. We're crowdfunding to build this. Can you support us?

https://crowdfunding.startsomegood.com/thepackmusiccoop #SupportLocal #LocalBusiness #AustralianMusic #HospitalityIndustry

RIP James Valentine

https://youtu.be/yeZdfuoKTgE?t=148

#jamesvalentine #australianmusic

You all know this story. You go to a gig and watch a local muso you love play to a room of about two hundred people. Everyone in the room has their phone out. The music is amazing. She makes enough from the gig to pay the band… but not to get ahead.

And she made $11 from streaming that month. Make you wonder how she'll fund recording her next album, hey… or whether she'll even bother.

We built The Pack Music Co-operative because we thought there was a better arrangement available — one where 70% of every subscription goes directly to the artists you actually listen to, where discovery surfaces music being made locally, and where the platform is owned by the musicians on it.

We thinking streaming should be a realistic supplementary income, not an extraction racket.

We're crowdfunding now, from $25. https://crowdfunding.startsomegood.com/thepackmusiccoop #ThePackMusic #FairPay #AustralianMusic #SupportLocalMusic

One of the more interesting things in Music Australia's 2025 Listening In research is what it reveals about young Australians: they want local music, feel pride in it, and are largely failing to find it on the platforms they use every day.

Under-25s and 25-34s are the cohort most fluent in streaming mechanics, most likely to pay for music despite genuine cost-of-living pressure, and most willing to subscribe to multiple services when one doesn't serve their needs.

The problem is that discovering Australian music on platforms designed for global recommendation requires active effort most listeners don't sustain. The algorithm hasn't been trained to care where you live.

The Pack closes that gap - not as a nationalist project, but because a platform that surfaces local music is genuinely more useful to a local listener. If you know young music lovers, arts educators, or anyone in the youth cultural sector — I'd love your help sharing this.

https://crowdfunding.startsomegood.com/thepackmusiccoop

#YouthCulture #AustralianMusic #EthicalBusiness #GenZ

We're only at 4% of our $45,000 goal.

I've been in the arts sector long enough to know that 4% is not zero, and that campaigns like this are not decided in the first month. But I also know that they are decided by people who share them, and talk about them, and back them when they can.

You don't have to be wealthy. You don't have to be in the industry. You just have to think that musicians deserve to be paid fairly for the work they do — and that a better infrastructure is worth building.

From $25 you get three months of free streaming at launch, and the knowledge that you helped build something that didn't exist before you did.

Share this. Back it. Tell someone.

https://crowdfunding.startsomegood.com/thepackmusiccoop

#ThePackMusic #MakeMusicFair #Crowdfunding #AustralianMusic