It is fantastic to see the Australian Broadcasting Corporation doing so well with their new music sharing site Triple J Unearthed.  

The site is modeled on CBC Radio 3’s NewMusicCanada.com

Four years ago I was invited to speak at the ABC’s annual radio meetings.  The following year I was asked to come back and do some workshops with various groups in Sydney and Melbourne. 

Linda Bracken who runs Triple J gave me office space (the run of the place really).  Back in 2003 Linda was keen to get a version of NewMusicCanada running – mostly to serve their awesome Unearthed contest.  So we spent lots of time talking about how to make it happen, what we’d learned creating and running NewMusicCanada (which we launched in 2000) and I spent some time with her technical team leads explaining how we had build things here.

Every now and then we’d exchange email and I’d ask how it was going, and she never lost sight of the goal – and if you’ve ever met Linda you’ll know that if she’s got her mind set on something, it’s going to happen. 

Last July they soft-launched Triple J Unearthed, and this week I got a note from her: 

unearthed has exceeded even my grand visions for its popularity ….in the first month it was launched it has over 10 000 tracks from 5000 bands….over 10 000 people visit each day ….we are actually overwhelmed by its success…the buzz here in the music community is fantastic … we are still getting around 200 tracks per day ! I think everyone in Australia with a guitar has uploaded surely.

It’s a great tribute to the team at Triple J that they’ve doing so well – and I’m thrilled to have had a tiny part to play in it.