AJ Maddah made me cry today

AJ Maddah made me cry today... Well not really. The tears were tweets, the eyes were the media and AJ was the mascara stick I accidentally poked my eyeball with.

Since we started in 2012 we've always been really supportive of every all ages festival in Sydney, even the shit ones (... Good Life shhhhh), because our aim as a publication is to get more young people supporting the music industry and discovering bands.

We have regular coverage of a wide range of shows. We have a strong and talented contributor base of 40, and a well established reputation with the community of underage concert-goers in Sydney. We aren't a shitty music blog that's been around for 3 minutes, but we certainly aren't Musicfeeds or Drum Media (RIP, but TheMusic is lovely) I would say calling us a part of the 'media' is erring on correct.

Our gig guide is unique because unlike most others floating around, it's not influenced by who is paying us or our own personal tastes, it promotes every single all ages show or festival, and Soundwave and Soundwave Touring are an integral part of the Sydney music scene.

And despite any unsolicited publicity we may have done for Soundwave and their tours, we've never had a reply to a single email.

We've been emailing them for almost 2 years. That's a lot of unresponded emails.

About a month ago I started getting messages about why we don't cover more Pop-punk or Metal gigs and I got another this morning so I decided to tweet AJ and ask a simple question:

@iamnotshouting why doesn't Soundwave give accreditation to small publications? I applied last year and was told it's by invite only.

— All Ages Concerts AU (@Allagesconcerts) January 12, 2014

In my opinion it was a perfectly polite and courteous way of asking after waiting 2 years for a reply.

Instead he took a dig at our fairly low amount of twitter followers.

So I'd like to thank AJ Maddah for summing up almost 2 years of my life into "You are not 'media'. You are not a 'community media'. You're not even a fanzine." Because not only is it comically worded and totally hilarious, there's no knowledge behind that statement. I doubt that AJ Maddah knows anything about All Ages Concerts Sydney, Making fun of our twitter followers is just mean, sorry we aren't Justin Bieber, but that doesn't make us any less important or mean that we don't work as hard as any other publication. It doesn't take much research to figure out that we're a fairly well established publication with a great community of followers in what's most definitely a niche market.

So AJ Maddah, if you're out there and you are a real person, all I'm asking is for some consideration. I'm not making any money but what I'm offering and what every other small publication is offering, is worth loads of money to you. Yes! You! None of us running smaller publications (For example, Project U, Audio Collective, and Casual Band Blogger) are making any money, but our readers/viewers/audiences/communities are buying expensive tickets to YOUR events. I know my website has definitely made you money. If you paid 1 staff member to handle smaller websites (which is honestly ridiculous because festivals with smaller resources and even Big Day Out manage to do it without hiring 50 extra employees as you suggested), that persons wage would be paid back and tripled, I can guarantee you.

ALL WE'RE TRYING TO DO IS SUPPORT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, AND YOU!

-Geneva Valek.

#soundwave