I’ll never forget the first time Richard Kingsmill played my band.
It was a Sunday night – of course it was a Sunday night – and I happened to be driving home from a friend’s house. Suddenly there he was in my car speakers, talking about my band, playing our song.
Monday was like a montage from a movie. Friends texted their praise. The handsome blond sales assistant at my record store, a cool guy who didn’t do small talk, congratulated me. Even my parents somehow found out.
Of course it didn’t work out: I joined the long list of musicians who descend back into obscurity as quickly as we emerge. But for a fleeting moment that Monday morning after being played on Kingsmill’s show, it seemed as though I had a chance.
That was the power of Richard Kingsmill. From his eyrie in an ABC Ultimo office crammed with teetering stacks of white-label CDs, Triple J’s music director picked the eyes out of Australian contemporary music for more than two decades.
For a long part of the 2000s, it seemed as though you couldn’t succeed in Australian music without Kingsmill’s support. A nod from him enabled rotation on Triple J’s national radio network. With regular airplay, artists could build an audience across much of metropolitan and, importantly, regional Australia. Festival slots, international tour supports – even a career – might follow.
Kingsmill’s power to make or break young artists was legendary. Stories abounded – most apocryphal – of his theatrical reactions during pitch sessions. Without Kingsmill’s imprimatur, there were only hard options: years-long slogs of small venues, empty rooms and the hard scrabble of building up a following from scratch.
That power understandably made a lot of musicians resentful. Artists who couldn’t secure Triple J airplay blamed him for their misfortune. Debates swirled about his outsize influence on the local music industry. A cottage industry of Kingsmill-pluggers developed as artists and labels sought ways to reach the man in the Triple J tower. A 2007 headline in the Sydney Morning Herald summed it up: “King still rules airwaves”.
Was the animus justified? Audiences didn’t care. Triple J’s heyday in the 1990s and 2000s saw it regularly pull in millions of younger listeners right across the continent. Under Kingsmill’s guidance, the network fostered a love of Australian music in a whole generation, elevating a succession of Australian artists to the status of household names. Commercial radio lumbered along far behind, playing mostly US pop and 80s classics between nudge-wink comedy duos and ads.
Kingsmill undoubtedly played favourites, but wasn’t that the point? By championing the likes of Powderfinger, Missy Higgins and Grinspoon, Kingsmill unabashedly curated national music taste. He also moved with the times, supporting up-and-comers like G Flip and Genesis Owusu. Not every artist got a run, and not every song got played. But lots did: as music director, Kingsmill helped gradually raise Triple J’s Australian music quota to a minimum of 40%. (Last year 60% of all music played on the station was Australian).
When I interviewed Kingsmill in 2009, at the height of his powers, he didn’t hide the fact that he found the criticism of Triple J unfair. “‘The mistruths are the ones that are most upsetting, that’s when it hurts,” he told me. “I’m not saying we’re perfect but we try really, really hard to get it right.” Kingsmill cared.
It’s tempting to call Kingsmill’s retirement the end of an era. In truth, the era passed some time ago. Arguments rage about whether Triple J’s audience is in fact declining: according to the ABC, it still reaches around 3 million listeners weekly in 2023. But its cultural significance has undoubtedly eroded. Global forces have sapped the relevance of terrestrial radio, while TikTok and Spotify have become the focus of the music industry. The majority of listeners now get their music from online streaming services and Triple J simply isn’t the juggernaut it used to be.
The result is an Australian music sector in structural decline. Fewer and fewer local artists are making it into the favourites of Australian listeners: the Aria charts featured just five Australian acts in the top 50 last year. The once ubiquitous “street press” – the free music publications so important to local culture throughout the 80s and 90s – is now almost dead. According to Apra, one-third of small venues have closed.
However much you liked or hated his musical taste, at least Kingsmill was a real human being. There are now far fewer niches for tastemakers and cultural intermediaries. Your Spotify feed is programmed by a ghostly algorithm, while the power to launch new artists has been passed to TikTok. As robot playlists and major label tie-ups move inexorably towards the commanding heights of the music economy, it may be that we come to look on Kingsmill’s time at Triple J with nostalgia.
He probably did have too much power at the apogee of his cultural influence, but he used it mostly for good: to encourage local music and young talent. We may well miss him now he’s going. He finishes his day-to-day duties at the ABC this week: the last of the important curators.
