No Love From Triple J

A few months ago Triple J put out the following call for submissions:

Are you obsessed with finding the latest music online? Do you know about every good Australian band worth anything at the moment? Have you got your own music blog? Do you annoy your friends with constant music facts and the latest bands they should know about? triple j want you on the triple j team for 2009. We’re after expressions of interest from Australian music lovers of all types. If you’re up for the challenge, send us your details.

The application process was not what I was expecting, as despite including a call for bloggers you had to submit either a video or audio file of yourself, giving the impression that they were more after presenters than anything else. But I decided that it would be a good way of making an initial contact, as I would be interested in photographing Brisbane gigs for their galleries and think I’m one of the few photographers not to have gotten a photo in JMag, so put together a little slideshow of the best of my Splendour In The Grass photos to accompany my submission and sent it off to them.

Got my reply today, which back in the days of graduate job applications we used to refer to as a “PFO”…

Hello

Thanks for your submission to triple j’s Wanted campaign. We put the call out far and wide and we were overwhelmed by the talent out there.

We’ve made a final shortlist and I’m sorry to tell you that you haven’t made the cut this time. The level of entries was pretty amazing, so don’t be disheartened. We will be calling out for submissions like this every year, so keep at it and keep in touch.

Cheers

triple j

Oh well.  Maybe they just took offence at me describing them as a ‘Sydney-centric celebratory circle jerk’. Be interesting to see if anyone gets anything out of this, as it was just an expression of interest rather than for any properly defined roles. And whether or not they live in Sydney…

7 Responses to “No Love From Triple J”

  1. Joel says:

    Hi Ed, Sydney-centric boy here 😉 (though I spent six months in Newcastle with work and loved it there too).

    I’d have to say if they did take offence to your critique then they’ve shown themselves to be both insular and unwilling to accept an outsider who might shake things up and improve quality. I think by not getting it you’ve come out ahead if you think about what you may have had to sacrifice in order to be accepted had the reasoning been that your critique was unwelcome. Brave management would have sought people like yourself to provide a fresh opinion – particularly at TripleJ, which is what I would expect and indeed demand from them.

    All the best with your future attempts to maintain the critique opportunities in the Australia music scene – an area that appears to be waning with the in rise power of band and tour managers :\

  2. Now imagine how frustrated you would be if you had spent a few years writing, perfecting, recording your songs, spent a few grand on production and pressing etc. Then you have one guy on staff at the so called champion of Australian independent music give you the PFO. The salt in the wounds comes when the bands that actually get airplay (ie. Sydney scenesters) tour and you see how shithouse they really are. One of my greatest cock-ups in life was subscribing to JMag… a year is a long time.

  3. Justin says:

    Thanks Joel. I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek (although it does annoy me how Sydney-centric they seem to be). They were a bit vague about what they were after, but my guess is that they probably want over-excited 18 year olds, the kind that posted in the Splendour forum on FasterLouder as opposed to jaded and cynical bloggers like me…

  4. pfft fuck triple j. but i guess it could have been good. are you actually getting payed for anything these days? not that the pay would be anything great anyways.

  5. Justin says:

    Yeah Adam, it’s pretty frustrating for me and I don’t even play in a band. I don’t listen to Triple J much but when I do it’s quite rare to hear a Brisbane/QLD band. You look at tomorrow’s Homebake line-up and there’s 2 Queenslanders – Violent Soho and Shane Nicholson. And Shane Niscolson is only there cos’ he’s playing with his missus (Kasey Chambers). With Crowded House and Die!Die!Die! playing there’s more Kiwis on the line-up than QLD acts.

    That Billboard said Brisbane was one of the world’s five musical hotspots last year seems to have been largely ignored by the music media. I was exepcting one of the monthlies to do a big feature on the Brisbane scene but I guess I was exepcting too much. I did look in Jmag yesterday (the one with MGMT on the front) and there was a bit of QLD content, with an interview with Simon Homer from +1 Records and live reviews of Butterfly Effect and Yves Klein Blue (although both reviews were from Melbourne gigs…). No QLD acts were included in the album reviews though.

    In all the times I’ve browsed through Blunt I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a Brisbane show reviewed. Maybe Overcranked, although they didn’t do one this year. Even the Biffy Clyro photo I did for them was to go with a Sydney review and I pretty much only got that ‘cos no one had photographed it down there. The Editor even said it was a good job that the singer played shirtless as no one would be able to tell it was from a different gig to the one being reviewed.

    And lets not get started on Rolling Stone…

  6. Dan says:

    I hear that Dom from whothehell.net has just been offered a role presenting triple j’s Home and Hosed show.

    So there’s one success story from the exercise.

  7. Justin says:

    Someone from Sydney. who’d have though 😛

    Nah, that’s good, Dom does some good stuff and I’m a regular Who The Hell reader. But he’s got a pretty high profile (he’s still Assistant Ed at The Brag isn’t he?) so i thought he’d be above the radar if Triple J were looking for people.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.