Why this exists

This website exists to promote gig guides as essential infrastructure within Australia's musical ecosystem.

On the Street, Drum Media, Beat, Xpress, 3D World, The Brag, Mess+Noise, Rip It Up, Time Off, The Green Guide ...

Gig guides have long been the beating heart of any thriving music scene — the faithful staple keeping punters in the loop on everything happening around them. They've given visibility to music in all its forms, happening in all kinds of places — from backyards, warehouses and coffee shops to pubs, clubs, theatres and stadiums.

And yet, most commercially published gig guides have died or are shadows of their former selves — leaving music communities without any roadmap to find what’s happening around them. DIY and independent media guides have also fallen by the wayside. It’s all for the same reasons: changing audience behaviours and worsening economic conditions. The replacement — social media — is opaque, hard to search, and at best offers a nagging feeling that you’re still missing out on something.

In recent years though, we’ve seen a resurgence of gig guides — now emerging from within the community. A completely unaffiliated spectrum of people, organisations and businesses that have decided to do something about the problem.

At SydneyMusic.net, we started running a not-for-profit gig guide for Sydney in 2022. We quickly realised that a proper gig guide — a real one, that comprehensively documents every nook and cranny of a local creative environment – is even more time-consuming than we imagined. But we also discovered just how amazing gig guides are at connecting people with their scene. Gig guides can come in all shapes and sizes — from the niche to the ambitiously comprehensive.

More than anything, we fell back in love with a whole lot of music that could only have been made right here, right now. We reckon that's an experience that can be replicated all over the country. Find your scene, connect with your community, and find your new favourite artist.

Editorial criteria

We’ve focused on guides that feature comprehensive but human-guided coverage.

We’re not anti-automation, and resources that are simply aggregators have their place — but these projects are a labour of love, and we think it's worth shining a light on them.

Credits

This website was created by:

Joe Hardy
Caitlin Welsh
Murray Bunton (front-end dev)
Emi Ew (illustrations)

Thanks also to courto for the project’s codename “Sgarnon”