Days after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd attended a live music fund-raising dinner in Melbourne, he has announced the federal government will spend $560,000 over three years on a new National Office for Live Music. The money will also pay for a national task force to produce a strategy to support live music.
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Mr Rudd attended Marieke Hardy's Dream Dinner on Tuesday night, a fund-raiser for the SLAM (Save Our Live Music) campaign, along with musicians Gotye and Jebediah frontman Kevin Mitchell, and television's Andrew Denton and Matt Preston.
As part of the announcement, high-profile musicians have been appointed ''ambassadors'' for live music in their states.
Most said they owed their careers to live music. Mitchell, who will be Victoria's ambassador, says he would have ''no job and no friends'' without a live music scene.
''When I first started playing music with Jebediah in Perth in 1995 we never talked about making records, we just dreamed of playing gigs at all our favourite venues that we'd gone to see our favourite bands play in before us,'' he says.
NSW ambassador Dave Faulkner says a healthy live music scene is crucial to the cultural richness of any city. ''People gathering together, making and enjoying music is a spiritual experience as old as humanity itself. Music unites us all.''
Matt Lambert (Suffa of the Hilltop Hoods), who is representing South Australia , says the decline in digital sales makes it essential to keep a strong live music scene.
Katie Noonan is Queensland ambassador, Leah Flanagan the ambassador for the Northern Territory, Kav Temperley (Eskimo Joe) for Western Australia and Dewayne Everett-Smith for Tasmania.
NSW has two ambassadors, the second being Stavros Yiannoukas from indie rockers Bluejuice.
