Business of Media
New ACCC chairwoman is Murdoch family insider
The incoming chairwoman of the competition watchdog has vowed to step away from all private appointments, including acting on behalf of Lachlan Murdoch in the trust that manages the family’s multibillion-dollar stake in media companies Fox and News Corp, report AFR’s Hannah Wootton and John Kehoe.
Former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd on Wednesday criticised the nomination of competition litigator Gina Cass-Gottlieb as the next chairwoman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission because of her long-standing ties to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s media empire.
Just last week, a Senate inquiry labelled that empire as the “clearest example of a troubling media monopoly” and slammed Australia’s regulation of news media as weak.
News Brands
Financial Review celebrates 70th year by ringing bell at ASX
The clanging of the Australian Securities Exchange bell to mark the opening of the markets is an honour typically reserved for new company listings, but on Wednesday that honour went to The Australian Financial Review, with former Pierpont columnist Trevor Sykes taking on the task enthusiastically, reports the AFR.
The clanging of the bell not only marked the opening of the market but a long relationship between the ASX and The Australian Financial Review, which is this year celebrating its 70th year in print.
LadBible founder worth £200m as shares rise after flotation
The 30-year-old founder of LadBible, the company born out of a sexist Facebook page that became one of the biggest global publishers on social media, is worth £200m after his business floated on the stock market, reports The Guardian’s Jim Waterson.
Alexander “Solly” Solomou, who created the Manchester-based media company while studying business management at the University of Leeds, has cashed in shares worth £50m and retains a stake worth about £150m in the listed LadBible Group.
Solomou used his life savings to buy the original LadBible Facebook page in 2012, and quickly learned how to game the site’s algorithms and make content go viral as social media use exploded. In the process he grew the business from a small outlet that recycled blokeish banter-heavy memes into a company that has about 450 staff, many of them young employees based in Manchester producing original content.
Entertainment
Screen Music Awards to head to Victoria in first live event since 2019
In a break from the usual timeframe, APRA AMCOS and the Australian Guild of Screen Composers (AGSC) are set to honour Australia’s finest creators of film, television, documentary and advertising music at the Screen Music Awards in early 2022.
Initially due to take place in November of this year, ongoing uncertainty around restrictions prompted the change of plans. The 2021 Screen Music Awards will instead celebrate Australian screen composers and their music soundtracks at Forum Melbourne on 22 February 2022.
APRA AMCOS CEO Dean Ormston said, “Our annual Screen Music Awards will be our first ‘in real life’ celebration of screen composers in two years! It will be truly wonderful to gather once again in Melbourne and honour the extraordinary soundscape Australian screen composers give to films, television series, advertisements and documentaries with the orchestra performing those nominated soundtracks in the beautiful Forum Melbourne. This year, we will also celebrate an extraordinary year of advocacy with APRA AMCOS and the AGSC fighting hard for new legislation that will see a significant boost to local screen production to enhance the livelihoods of screen composers, the unsung heroes of our country’s screen industry.”
Co-hosting the first live celebration of the Screen Music Awards since 2019 will be Nakkiah Lui, Akina Edmonds, and Uncle Jack Charles.
Nakkiah Lui, Akina Edmonds and Uncle Jack Charles
Nakkiah is a writer/actor and Gamillaroi/Torres Strait Islander woman whose stage and screen credits include ABC’s Black Comedy and Preppers; television series Kiki and Kitty and her award-winning play Black is the New White. Singer and actor Akina Edmonds has appeared in high-profile theatre productions including Hairspray, An Officer and a Gentleman and Disney’s The Lion King. Akina is currently playing Angelica Schuyler in the Australian production of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Uncle Jack Charles is a Boon Wurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung man – an Australian legend: Indigenous elder, actor, musician and activist. He is acknowledged as the grandfather of Aboriginal theatre in Australia, co-founding the first Aboriginal theatre company Nindethana in 1972. Uncle Jack’s acting career spans over six decades and his stories have touched many across the globe. He’s currently appearing alongside Nakkiah Lui in Preppers.
The Awards will feature the presentation of thirteen awards as well as interpretations of the four Feature Film Score of the Year nominations performed by the Screen Awards orchestra, led by musical director, Jessica Wells whose compositions cross many genres in the classical, commercial and film music worlds. Jessica has worked for some of Australia’s best composers as an orchestrator, arranger and copyist.
The nominees for the 2021 Screen Music Awards will be announced on 20 January 2022.
2021 SCREEN MUSIC AWARDS CATEGORIES
• Best Music for an Advertisement
• Best Music for Children’s Programming
• Best Music for a Documentary
• Best Music for a Mini-Series or Telemovie
• Best Music for a Short Film
• Best Music for a Television Series or Serial
• Best Television Theme
• Best Original Song Composed for the Screen
• Best Soundtrack Album
• Feature Film Score of the Year
• Most Performed Screen Composer – Australia
• Most Performed Screen Composer – Overseas
• Distinguished Services to the Australian Screen
Sydney rapper takes out top TikTok song in 2021
Whether you intended to or not, chances are high you’ve had TikTok-famous songs in your head all year — or is that just me? Considering approximately 430 songs had more than one billion video views as TikTok sounds in 2021 (a threefold increase over 2020), chances are it’s not just me, reports News Corp’s Kassia Byrnes.
The most popular of these songs have featured in videos that garnered as many as 20 billion views or more.
TikTok has released the artists that topped its viewing charts, and none other than Sydney rapper Masked Wolf nabbed the top song in the world with his 2019 hit Astronaut in the Ocean.
Radio
Justin Bieber and The Kid Laroi tipped to win Hottest 100 despite the station’s ‘ban’
It’s that time again, music lovers. Out with the “Spotify wrapped” tiles, in with the triple j Hottest 100 lists, reports News Corp’s Bella Fowler.
This week, voting for Australia’s biggest music democracy, the triple j Hottest 100, opened to the public, along with the floodgates for avid listeners to flex their choices on Instagram.
Previously, listeners have revolted against any inkling of a “mainstream” artist possibly infiltrating the poll, but given this year, the station has embraced pop music with open arms more than ever before, one of its former “banned” artists may hit number one. Justin Bieber.
Television
Delta Goodrem reveals why she left The Voice
Delta Goodrem has opened up about her surprise departure from The Voice in a new interview, revealing she was keen to “find a new chapter creatively” after eight seasons on the show, reports News Corp’s Nick Bond.
Goodrem served as a coach on The Voice from season one back in 2012, skipping season three and then returning until season nine in 2020.
But then, The Voice took an unexpected turn, as rival network Seven poached the series last year when the Nine Network failed to exercise its option to pick up the show within the required time frame.
After months of speculation, a new coaching panel was revealed – and while previous coaches Guy Sebastian and Keith Urban had made the leap across networks, Goodrem was nowhere to be seen.
Todd Sampson missed Gruen finale
“Sorry I couldn’t be there for the final episode,” Todd Sampson told Gruen viewers last night, reports TV Tonight.
“It’s either a close contact of COVID or I’ve run out of t-shirts.”
Dee Madigan took his chair for a second week running, but Russel Howcroft made it to the studio for the first time this season.
Everyone knows who stole the Picasso, but no one agrees on who it was
Marc Fennell really knows how to satisfy his curiosity. A year ago, the media polymath – he’s a co-anchor on The Feed, award-winning podcaster, and host of Mastermind, among various gigs – learnt through Twitter of an infamous crime he’d never known about: in 1986 Pablo Picasso’s painting The Weeping Woman was stolen from Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, with ransom demands left by a group calling itself Australian Cultural Terrorists, reports SMH’s Craig Mathieson.
“I remember just going, ‘why isn’t this an incredibly talked about chapter in Australian history?’” Fennell says. “Some people remembered it well, but for others, fact had become fiction and rumour had overtaken the story.”
Just 12 months later and Fennell knows much more about the theft, which was then a media sensation in Melbourne and the subject of headlines worldwide. The result, in close collaboration with two colleagues from The Feed, writer and director Corrin Grant and producer Ninah Kopel, is Framed, a four-part true-crime documentary which in 100 minutes takes viewers through variously a cultural crossfire, true crime farce, and lingering tragedy.