Everything is Fine, All the Time, Forever

If you’re a popular music fan - I mean popular in the way of “not classical” - you’re probably one of dozens of people around the world that read music press and album reviews.

Flipping through digital pages, you’ll see quickly that most albums are given about a 7, while actually good ones are given tongue-baths in 8s or 9s. You sit back and wonder - is modern music really that, well, above average?

No - and it stands to reason that it isn’t. In the 80s and 90s you needed record company backing to release and distribute your music onto a physical medium. Gatekeepers gatekept because their money was on the line. If artists didn’t get signed, they didn’t exist. Today, any melanin-deprived beat shuffler can excrete his ambient trip hop tracks on to Spotify or Soundcloud within minutes, for free.

We have more new music than ever before and according to Sturgeon’s law, 90% of it is shit.

So why the discrepancy? Because 100% of the music press are funded 100% by an amalgam of record companies, touring promoters, and/or the bands themselves. They also furnish the press with access to sources. (Hence the “access media.”) You can’t give a band a shit review because they’re paying for results - and the appearance of independent cultural legitimacy.

If hype stickers - those little blurbs on the front of CDs and vinyl with five stars, or high ratings out of 10 and pull quotes of “Outstanding!” from the press - still carried weight, all of them would say the same thing.

In the music biz, the fourth estate has been absorbed into the ancien regime in totality. The only aspect separating record companies from the press is which bank account the funds are deposited. There is no next big thing by accident. It’s all kayfabe - the pro wrestling term for maintaining the illusion every facet of pro wrestling is real.

The other kayfabe - on a societal scale - is pretending that the media is holding the government to account. In 2024, commercial free to air television made approximately $3.28 billion in revenue of which $59.3 million came from Federal government departments (2025), about a quarter of their combined $204.1 million spending on media buys.

OzTam estimates that broadcast TV and Broadcast Video on Demand (BVOD) reaches 71% of the population, on average. Men and women over the age of 65 take the largest share of broadcast TV viewership (20% and 24.3% respectively.) So, the government is pulling out all the stops to convince the most cashed up slice of the population that everything is hunky dory – because for the bulk of them, it is.

The Australia Institute found during the 2020-21 financial year the Australian Government spent more on advertising than Coles, Woolworths, and McDonalds together.

During the height of the COVID lockdowns, the Victorian State Government spent $62 million on telling people to stay home or be shot by rubber bullets because grandma needed saving. Their Orwellian doublespeak “staying apart keeps us together” campaign hit taxpayer pockets to the tune of $11.5 million. They could’ve spent that money on something worthwhile, like machete amnesty bins.

The mainstream media is on life support and one of the decrepit legs propping it up is government. Every libertarian in Australia is united on this (at least) - we want to defund the ABC and transition it to a commercial or subscription model. If it’s so beloved, let it stand on its own. We all know that the A, B, and C should read “Australians Broadcasting Communism” even though they investigated themselves and found that they weren’t. You don’t say?

For this week’s boneheaded boffin brain fart, the government is spending $20 million on its “fuel saving campaign” telling us to (checks notes) keep our tyre pressure as per manufacturer recommendations.

Seriously?

The bulk of the mainstream media will report on this like it’s the most normal thing in the world, because they are direct government advertising beneficiaries. If we are waiting for the fourth estate to save us from COVID lockdowns, spiralling debt, NDIS graft, fuel shortages, or any of the other examples of government malfeasance and/or incompetence, don’t – because they’re robbing us to sell their gaslighting and BS back to us in between the fiftieth season of MasterChef (how much crying over croquembouches can Australia tolerate, really?) You can’t give a government a shit review, because they’re paying for results.

Though Noam “definitely a communist” Chomsky is cited over and over saying the media’s function is to “manufacture consent” for the government because of evil capitalist ownership. There’s nothing wrong with that – we want as many budding entrepreneurs starting up as many media outlets as our eyes and ears can handle. Crony capitalism, corporations captured by government and forcing out competition, is always a disaster. If you turn the screws on advertising, you take away the stenographers.

Media sentiment is all about following the (taxpayers) money. Medianet, one of Australia’s largest news aggregators and public relations wire services, wrote in an email blast the other week:

“Australia’s under 16 social media ban was a world-first in social media regulation. Three months later we’ve seen the media narrative shift from scepticism over the enforceability of the ban to widespread acceptance of it.”

They said convincing data moved the needle. When the government’s cheques cleared, there’s no wonder that they accepted mass censorship.

If governments want to spruik their “great achievements” by gaslighting the country, let the ruling parties fund it and see how far it gets – because people are smarting up, and fast.