Flying Nun, Music & Me: Looking Ahead to 2025

The year that was and the year that will be.

Although we are already half way into January 2025, I’m going to begin my first post with a short reflection on 2024. In particular for Flying Nun Records and also myself. It will start out a little gloomy, then look forward to the (hopefully) brighter future.

For most people working in local music - or any creative industry - 2024 was a challenging year. To any reader not familiar with the local Aotearoa political landscape, the conservative Government elected at the end of 2023 has been hell bent on austerity and cut backs, particularly the civil and social services. With exceptions (landlords and the wealthy!) for many, things have been tough.

In particular, the capital city Wellington was hit hard. The statistic that stood out for me was that possibly 11% of people in the city with a job, have now lost that job. That’s one in ten. While those stats have subsequently been questioned, undoubtably, either way, there has been a flow through effect to small businesses like Flying Nun. People have been hanging onto their money.

Visiting other cities last year, Auckland didn’t seem much better, although Christchurch feels a little more lively.

Other factors made selling records in 2024 a bit of a grind; like major record labels hiking vinyl prices, or daily stories in the media predicting the collapse of retail. It was a bit of a down in the dumps vibe. That said, we had it nowhere near as bad as many other sectors, like hospitality for example.

Overall, it also seemed like many artists and musicians - both at home and abroad - felt pretty gloomy about their prospects. Aside from a few small but dedicated local music publications, getting any sort of ‘cut through’ or significant attention for new music seemed incredibly hard work, nigh on impossible. Local media, of course, is having its own troubles.

Currently, there is a lot of talk about the concentration of power in the hands of a handful of large offshore tech giants and how that adversely effects real musicians, local scenes, listening habits and so on. Not to mention AI, of course. In particular, Spotify has rightly come in for a lot of flack - and that looks to continue with the publication of a new book by Liz Pelly, which is getting a lot of attention. I haven’t actually read the book yet, but I did meet Liz in New York a few years ago. She knows what she’s talking about. A good article/summary on the book is here.

2024 was also a sad year with the deaths of significant people to Flying Nun - notably Martin Phillipps and Doug Hood. There were many others.

So that was the bad news.

But thinking on it some more, 2024 also had many positives for Flying Nun.

Although the record label released less than usual - we still had a number one album in April with DARTZ ‘Dangerous Day for a Cold One’ album. There were some other gems in there that are still on high rotate - the Mystery Waitress LP and Office Dog EP. Vera Ellen became the fourth artist on Flying Nun to win the Taite Music Prize, Look Blue Go Purple took out the Classic Album award.

DARTZ, Office Dog and Vera Ellen are also making good headway offshore, with regular touring and good sized audiences. Opportunities are still out there - like Vera Ellen opening for Crowded House (five nights sold out at the Sydney Opera House!) and Office Dog touring larger venues in the US with Nada Surf.

Vera Ellen & band performing at the Sydney Opera House, opening for Crowded House

In other positives, Flying Nun opened a third flagship record store, in Christchurch. This location is powered by the indefatigable Matthias McGregor. As mentioned, that southern city (the home of Flying Nun) seems to be undergoing a long overdue renaissance. Although it’s only been operating six months, the Christchurch store is off to a good start. I’m not sure the city is ‘the next Berlin’ (as one person said to me), but I can see the parallels in terms of rebuilding a damaged city.

Fazerdaze performing at the Flying Nun Christchurch store opening

It is only just over a year since Flying Nun opened the Auckland store on Karagahape rd, so I’ll chalk that up under the positives of 2024. The first ‘official’ store is based in Wellington.

For the second half of 2024 I was generously offered a sabbatical from teaching at Massey University. This was to pursue a Flying Nun archival project. As per usual, it turned out to be a bigger job than anticipated. It is still a work in progress, so more on this another time.

Although 2024 has yielded both good and bad, overall, I think the consensus would be that 2024 was hard. Increasingly, working in music appears to be dominated by either data entry, digital metadata wrangling, spreadsheets, budgets, admin and more admin (too many emails!). If not that, then frequent short-term crisis management. It’s not what most of us got into music to do. But somehow, it just kind of happens that way.

I’ve heard it said that the music industry these days is the metadata industry. It does seem that so called ‘data alchemists’ are running things at the top - from major labels to streaming services. The big major label fish also seem to be increasingly swallowing the small independent fish - whether that is the Orchard/Sony buying local digital aggregator DRM here at home, or Universal buying Downtown (and all it’s associated independent enterprises) internationally. Locally, The Live Nation juggernaut continues to hoover up most of the gig dollars - although there are positive developments with excellent new independent venues like Double Whammy (Auckland) and Meow Nui (Wellington).

Artists also seem frustrated with the time they have to devote to social media and other admin, which takes away from the actual music making. That seems a fair complaint.

I don’t know what the answer is to all this, but I’m keen to put some thought and writing into it. How do we make working in music more viable and enjoyable in 2025?

Personally, one part of that rethink is realising that I just didn’t listen to enough new music. Yes, I listened to music; actually a lot of music. But without being aware of it, I was subtly and unknowingly being gently transitioned and trained into that ‘lean back’ listening mode. That’s where the algorithm is choosing the tunes for you. You’re not actually noticing or even knowing what you are listening to. Last year, I didn’t do enough ‘lean forward’ and investigative listening.

Active or ‘lean forward ‘listening is both more rewarding and absolutely necessary if you want to work in music. You need to know who you are actually listening to. You need to think about it. You need to engage with current sounds and music developments. You need to take the time to even listen to stuff you don’t really like, or you think you don’t like. But the way streaming platforms are designed is make listening so easy, safe and ubiquitous. Then it just becomes background music. A mood for your lifestyle. It’s a tyranny of algorithmic-auto-play.

If you think about it, there is a benefit to a CD or vinyl record just finishing and nothing automatically coming on afterwards. Then you have to make an active and deliberate choice as to what you listen to next.

Another more prosaic (and a little tragic) reason I didn’t listen to enough music is that one of the Flying Nun record stores (which I won’t identify!) appears to have have hijacked my personal (Ben Howe) Spotify account. Seems a small thing, but somehow I was too busy with the aforementioned metadata and spreadsheets to actually fix this. 100% my own fault. New Years resolution #1: Fix that problem! Change my streaming platform.

A useful analysis of the pay rates of streaming platforms pay out per stream is in this video by Benn Jordan (towards the later part of the video). I don’t think I’ll go with Peloton, but any suggestions as to better platforms appreciated.

Looking ahead - and setting aside the state of the rest of the world right now - fortunately, for Flying Nun, 2025 is looking more positive.

We have got a lot of interesting releases coming down the pipeline. Some of these are already announced (Reb Fountain, The 3ds, Womb). You’ll hear more about others in due course. It also seems like a good time to consolidate what has been a fairly frenetic period of growth (opening three new record stores in about three years). To fine tune these and build upon a good start.

Personally, I’d like to try and focus on some of those things I enjoy more - like listening to music, writing stuff like this. I also really enjoyed making this “What Was That Thing” video series. That’s something that fell off the agenda last year, but I’m proud of the almost 90 episodes we (Lochie Noble and myself) made with a budget of exactly zero dollars. It was a fun creative project, although like many of the best bits, it was never going to help Flying Nun pay the bills. I’m not sure if there will be time, but it would be great to revive it.

One thing I’ve been planning to do for a while, is trying to write down some answers to questions I am frequently asked about the music industry. In other words, try to do something useful and helpful for other people aspiring in music.

So, the intention of this Substack - Get a life. In music - is to alternate between more personal updates related to music, the music industry and Flying Nun (ie more like this one), with other posts discussing questions that might be helpful to musicians and people working in music. This includes my students at Massey University and also anyone else who might be interested. I’m working on the first one now, provisionally titled “How Does Music Get Popular?”

Some of these questions might be also simple or practical - like how music licensing works (actually, not that simple - might be better explained in a video), others might be more rambling philosophical thoughts.

In the next few weeks I’ll probably be closing down some of my other personal social media accounts (Facebook for sure!) - but hopefully I’ll keep this Substack going.

At the time of writing this I have exactly one subscriber (myself), so, if you want to tune in to an approximately weekly post of trying to answer music questions, Flying Nun and other stuff, please hit that subscribe button below.