Last month, US rapper Azealia Banks published an Instagram story in which she labelled the Australian music industry “ever dwindling”, “insignificant” and “culturally stale”.
In her posts – which also contained allegations about dealings she had with an Australian music company – Banks shared a screenshot of a Guardian story about how streaming platforms were affecting the country’s listening habits; it noted that just 22 of the 296 songs included in Australia’s weekly Top 50 across 2022 came from Australian musicians. “Australians don’t even want to hear Australian music LOL,” Banks wrote, adding that that was a “correlation between the government’s purposeful ethnic cleansing of [First Nations] peoples and their inability to produce music anyone anywhere cares about.”
