Interview: UnderTheRadar 20th Anniversary - Daryl Fincham

It's UnderTheRadar's 20th anniversary this year! Your free nationwide gig guide, independent music news site and locally owned and operated ticketing service is celebrating with new UTR merch designed by Callum Rooney and a jumbo prize pack giveaway, but you better move fast. Get in your entries HERE and preorder by Friday 16th August HERE.

It's been my privilege to be in the UnderTheRadar editor's hot seat for nearly seven years now, sharing the office with founder and chief Daryl Fincham, plus a murderer's row of assistant editors and editorial assistants. In the past five years since our 15th birthday, UTR has twice been finalist for the Outstanding Music Journalism Award and winner of the SRN Outstanding Achievement Award trophy, which is proudly on display on the shelf above the kettle. Alongside our regular music news and interview features, we've branched out into comics journalism (with Yeehawtheboys in 2023) and producing online video shows in collaboration with Sports Team — the popular and ramshackle Trash Recital (2021 to 2023), and our new Live Music Bar series.

All this activity orbits Aotearoa's live music community, a core ethos unchanged since Daryl came up with UnderTheRadar as an online gig guide in 2004, informed by his experiences working with independent imprint Kog Transmissions and driving up and down the motu with his band Meterman. Founding editor Angela Windust soon expanded UTR with up to the minute news and features, complementing the site's innovative online ticketing service. You can read our oral history of UTR's development HERE.

It was well past time to point the interview mic in Daryl's direction again. He chatted about navigating the treacherous no-gigs lockdown period, insights into his own DIY music origins, UTR's ongoing mission, challenges facing our live music community, the time he played with Damo Suzuki from Can, and more...

Chris Cudby: Here we are, twenty years of UnderTheRadar. An incredible achievement. Congratulations!

It has been an eventful five years since our 15th birthday celebrations, including the global pandemic and lockdowns from 2020 onwards. A period of time when UTR was operating as a live music ticketing service and free gig guide when there were no gigs on. What was it like on your end, navigating the sudden wave of gig cancellations in 2020 and the subsequent on-again / off-again traffic light system era?

Daryl Fincham: Yeah, that was intense. It was a situation we hadn’t been in before, where there was a full stop to live music, with no end in sight. No money coming in, but about 200 upcoming events that needed to be cancelled, postponed or in limbo. For us it was our busiest period handling over 10,000 people's new tickets or refunds. It's actually one of my most proud moments as a team to get through Covid in 2020, and then again in 2021 when Omicron happened with a new wave of cancelled shows. Special crisis shout out to the Auckland and Hawkes Bay floods of 2022, which wiped out dozens of shows.

We turned our music focus to 'support the scene' and helped with Save Our Venues and any piece of positive music industry news we could find. We did some quick action thanks to the likes of Delaney Davidson running online streaming events, which we could promote and ticket. They were really quite special while people were locked away in their houses, the communal live events brought everyone together. We were also steered clear of danger by the likes of NZ Music Commission and NZ On Air helping us navigate through.

It became the time of the micro gig — shows under 100 people which we were quite suited for.

Do you see any ripple effect from the pandemic era on today's live music culture in Aotearoa, gig attendance etc?

Straight after the lockdown, when people could go out again, every show on UTR sold out. People just wanted to connect with people again in real life and had time to discover music they liked. This has since settled down a little but what seems to be going strong is the concept of the micro gig and audience. More than ever people are finding their niche sound they like, and we have a full platter to choose from in NZ.

Dialling it right back when you started UnderTheRadar on 2004, you were playing in Meterman, and working with local independent label Kog Transmissions and their rock imprint Midium (Jakob, Day One, Meterman), run by Hamish Walker. What spurred you into action to make an online gig guide? How did people access it back then — on desktops or laptops? How did you anticipate we'd soon all be carrying around small computers in our pockets?

Yeah, I had played in bands from 1996, and was with Meterman from 1998 to 2004 (and later in Sports). We toured a lot up and down the country, Gisborne three times a year. So got a feel for the struggle of driving around NZ (planes were too expensive back then), once in an RX7 and a trailer, and playing to no-one and being hungry.

I was really into everything music and industry so was very thankful to come into KOG (2000) as a lackie intern (thanks to Hamish Walker, Callum August and Chris Chetland), making cups of tea, driving people around and wiring up the computers. I had to supply my own desktop computer and chair haha. KOG was a beast back then as one of the largest independent music labels in Australasia with their varied artists. From Pitch Black and Concord Dawn, to P-Money / Scribe and the rock imprint Midium which handled Jakob, Day One and Meterman. I was only there for a couple of years but I learnt a lot about the music industry and also from KOG's side, it showed how being nice goes a long way. I got involved in building their new website then, and it was this part of the online world I carried on with. I also started a home label Etch Recordings, and had some vinyl pressed.

I loved to tinker on my computer on weekends during the hangovers, and wanted a place to list some of the releases we had piling up. So we started listing our 7", 8", 10", 12" CDs and tees. We kept an eye out for other local bands releasing eg. The Fanatics, Die Die Die, The Mint Chicks, Missing Teeth. This led to artist pages, to group them, and then news to write about them. The natural addition was the gig guide to show when these bands would be playing live. There weren't a lot of other guides out there, just major ones that were too hard to sift through. So we just made one simple criteria: live gigs, original music only. We wanted to have all the hard working bands that had poured their hearts and heads out into writing songs to be in the main guide.

The music news criteria has always been solid too. It doesn't matter the genre or size, just as long as it’s good. No issues with posting a Led Zep news piece followed by the Dead C. You will often see a full feature for a show with a capacity of 30 people because it's important.

There wasn't a lot of need for a phone version back then. We did have a separate mobile version for WAP phones (old Nokia etc) which was painful to handle (code) both. The width of the site was only 600px wide (which was the norm), now it's up to 1800px and growing.

We did spot early on that mobile was going to be key, especially for convenience — eg. out with friends, get talking and buy your tickets then. I got my special fuzzies when scanning in a show seeing people use the UTR app to display their tickets and we use the UTR app to scan in. Phones talking to phones! Mobile is now about 70% of the traffic coming through.

We now also run our ticketing late, so there's no need to close sales. People can literally walk up to the venue's door, buy a ticket on the UTR app and go in. No paper!

When did you play as a member of Damo Suzuki's Network and how did you get involved? What was that experience like?

That was pretty special. Earlier (2001) we had met a band from Chicago through Napster! They were called Defender and were pretty similar to us in many ways with the synth rock sound, similar to Can and Trans Am. A few emails ended in us playing in USA and we stayed with them and were shown the Chicago sights. We also released a split 12” called HEMISPHERES through their label Some Odd Pilot (US) and Midium (NZ). George from Defender ended up joining Damo Suzuki’s Neverending Tour lineup and travelled Europe with him and organised a lot of his shows, eventually booking NZ.

It was pretty unreal to have Damo here, staying in our crummy Kingsland flat with us and then playing shows. We / Meterman joined as his band with George too, and played in Auckland and Wellington (Kings Arms and San Fran). At one point in Auckland we had Thom Burton (Guardian Singles) also jump on stage with us, and plug into my amp with me, which was probably a bad sounding mistake but a lot of fun. It’s a daunting prospect to hit the stage with no rehearsals and no song structure for an hour.

UTR's ticketing service launched in 2008 — as Angela said: "It allowed us to grow as a site and I like to think it also allowed the scene to grow by providing that bridge between the local music scenes and their audiences". What kind of challenges are involved in running an independent ticketing service in Aotearoa and how do you make it accessible for a wide variety of users? The work must bleed into weekends and holidays?

Naivety made this all possible. It didn't seem like it would be hard to build ticketing software, so just started doing it. Turns out it’s complex haha. We refined quickly along the way and was able to launch in a few months. With some trickle in income, we were able to have our first full time employee with Angela chucking in her job to work full time.

It was pivotal having Angela at the helm, who took the site from an after hours hobby into the largest music website in the country in a few short years.

Critically we started just before a lot of other players started to enter the field so we had a few months head start, and it was straight away pretty popular. We just wanted three key things: super simple to add the ticket, super easy to find and buy tickets, and the lowest cost possible to encourage people to go to the shows. That's still the aim now. We don't data harvest, and only ask for the minimum info so we can help people find their lost tickets (which happens a lot).

So with the ticketing addition, this became the simple crux of our offering to the community. Tell people an event is happening, get them to get their tickets and see some live music. As it’s all free to set up, it also enabled all local bands and promoters to try out ticketing their shows and get a feel for how important the presale is.

Like Rohan Evans from the Wine Cellar clearly explains: “​​Ticketing is a very good idea, unlike social media intentions and real life promises a sold ticket is reliable".

The mentally hard part, is that the website doesn't stop. There hasn't been a true day off in this time, where emails could be left unchecked. It's a seven day a week, twelve hour a day operation, kind of like a needy pet.

Laying out the basics — what kind of shows is the free UTR Gig Guide set up to support? We've been branching out into comedy recently?

Yeah, it’s friendly to all live music which is a unique event. So it can be the brand new band playing songs on a Wednesday at the local, to comedy if it's running through UTR. We have done some movie screenings, and even a bachelor party hahah. Ultimately the key is to keep the guide as easy to read as possible, so not to have the events which run everyday, or week, but ones that are a special event.

It's pretty cool that we can actually have vinyl pressed in NZ again. What do you reckon are some of the bigger changes or evolutions you've witnessed in local music culture over the past 20 years? I don't think Myspace / social media was even big then. Were compact discs and home-burned CD-rs still the main format when UTR started?

It was 90% CDs then, with vinyl for the audiophiles, and then a big surge into MP3s. MP3s probably drove more people into vinyl, as the comparison from MP3s sound quality to vinyl is quite stark.

Myspace was around. Not Facebook yet. There was Friendster and Bebo, and the legendary nzmusic.com, which you needed to have a bit bag of popcorn ready before diving in [shoutout also to the addictive Punkas forums back then - Ed.].

It’s quite amazing how plentiful the amount of great bands and songs are out there. With the addition of easy and cheap home recordings, being able to upload your music direct to large audiences from your home has made it super simple to take part. Discovery is another issue now, but that’s where we can come in to take a lens to it. There’s a dozen new ticketing services a year, but they are all billboards in the desert where the shows go undiscovered. That’s our real benefit: there’s a large existing audience (300,000+) which already visit to get their news and gig tickets.

Tough question: What are some of your favourite gigs you've ever been to? Any young local acts you've been enjoying? Long-term personal favourite local acts?

I was a big fanboy of Xanadu, Sharpie Crows, Bailterspace, HDU, Subliminals. I would go to every show even driving down to the Tron when that lined up.

I still love that Jakob are still going and sounding as large as ever. Every other week I hear a new song on the B, and have to find out who it is. Music in NZ is strong and still finding new ways to be exciting. Anything Guardian Singles is about right.

What kind of challenges do you see facing live gig culture across Aotearoa, in our current moment?

Bands and artists need places to play. We are losing a lot of key places currently to make the kind of sustainable environment for the bands and the audience to come together.

Venues need to be seen as culture and heritage locations that need protection from the hustle of inner city rental profits.

The UnderTheRadar team, past and present:

Daryl Fincham
Angela Windust
Nicola Clark
Gareth Meade
Matt Williamson
Courtney Sanders
Danielle Street
Glen Metzler
Fluffy
Hunter Keane
Chris Cudby
Jess Fu
Annabel Kean
Amelia Berry
Sam Denne
Lara Marie
Charlotte Marie
Samantha Cheong

You can help support UTR into the future by:

Using our ticketing service. Made by members of Aotearoa's independent music community for our community, ticketing with UTR is easy, reliable and even fun (know in advance how many people are heading along) — more than a million tickets sold so far! Find out more HERE.

Purchasing awesome UTR merch, for example our new 20th anniversary tees! Head over HERE for more options, including UTR roving reporter caps, classic UTR logo tees and totes. Our merch store is open from 20th June (today) to 16th August.

Advertising your show / tour / new release with UTR. We have handy targeted options for artists and promotors of all levels HERE.

Becoming a UTR member! Keep in the loop with our free weekly newsletter HERE.

Listing your event on our free nationwide gig guide HERE.

Becoming a UTR supporter! You can show your support to keep UTR running by making a small contribution. Any amount can make a huge difference, details HERE.

Going to a gig and supporting Aotearoa's unparalleled live music culture. Let's support each other!

300K MEMBERS, 100K GIGS, 20K NEWS ARTICLES AND 1 COFFEE POT.