Abstract
This chapter examines a tension at the heart of the Australian streaming industry between, on the one hand, a rapid increase in subscribers to international (i.e. Netflix) and local (i.e. Stan) platforms, and on the other, a relative lack of original Australian content produced for these services. These tensions are typified by the use of music: specifically, the reliance on non-local popular song complicates the distinction between supposedly regional and international productions, and this has implications for both the local reception of a series and the transnational perception of Australian identity. By examining two of the first original Australian streaming productions, Tidelands (Netflix, 2018) and Wolf Creek (Stan, 2016–2017), this chapter argues that the significant uses of non-Australian popular music fulfil an important narrative function in each series, relating to how they construct an opposition between notions of ‘home’ and its absence. These issues speak to wider themes concerning the musical representation of Australian national identity in streaming media.
Even in an increasingly fragmented world, Australian stories on television will continue to be shared. We need to look collaboratively and creatively at ways to ensure they are not sidelined, but remain a key feature of our media landscape.
—(Scott 2015, in Arrow et al. 2016, viii)
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04 December 2022
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter focuses on the period 2015–2019 and excludes both co-productions and series originally produced for another broadcaster and later acquired by Netflix. At the time of writing (July 2020), these 2019 catalogue figures (with data collected on 2 August 2019) were the latest available.
- 2.
Stan is a subsidiary of Nine Entertainment Co., which also owns the free-to-air (FTA) Nine Network, one of the major FTA networks in Australia. Stan’s subscriber base grew by 60.5% from 2018 to 2019, although its audience of 3.3 million is significantly less than Netflix’s 11.9 million subscribers (Roy Morgan 2019).
- 3.
Scott Morrison’s government has proposed measures to stimulate the return to media production (see Davies 2020) and there are a number of high-profile original commissions in the pipeline, including thriller miniseries Clickbait (Netflix).
- 4.
Coyle defines non-diegetic music (also known as ‘underscore’) as ‘music that runs “underneath” the action of the film’. She notes, ‘whether this music supports or subverts the image track, there is no doubt that it has an effect’ (1998, 6). By contrast, she defines diegetic music as ‘music written into the film narrative and heard as, for example, music playing on a radio or by a band performing in the background’ (6–7). The boundary between these two terms is, of course, permeable, but nevertheless provides a working definition for the current study.
- 5.
Production (or library) music refers to recorded sound files that can be selected from a pre-existing catalogue for use in audiovisual media productions. Editors can search these vast collections by keywords or descriptions (e.g. instrumentation, mood, or tempo) to find appropriate (and often, low-cost) music for their productions.
- 6.
Visual and sonic representations of these films, as internationally recognised markers of Australian identity, featured prominently in the Closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games (2000), as noted in Coyle (2005, 4–6).
- 7.
At the time of writing, both a third season of the streaming series and a separate third film are scheduled for production.
- 8.
These titles are ‘Billabong’, ‘Kutyukutyu’, ‘Salt Lake’, ‘Opalville’, ‘Rome’, and ‘Wolf Creek’. The series moves across the Australian landscape, from the Northern Territory in the first episode, through to Western Australia for the final denouement. A number of the locations are mildly fictionalised versions of real places, including the town of Roma, and the Wolfe Creek National Park.
- 9.
Michael Yezerski composed the score for the second season.
- 10.
Examples include: Aisha Badru, “Bridges,” Pendulum, Nettwerk, 2018; Zola Jesus, “Taiga,” Taiga, Mute Records Ltd., 2014; Maiah Manser, “Second Skin,” Second Skin, Buddy Ross Music, 2017; Louise Lemón, “Egyptian Darkness,” Purge, Icons Creating Evil Art, 2017. This musical style can be understood within the wider context of the ‘sadcore’ (or ‘slowcore’) musical genre, which has achieved popularity in television and trailer production (see Deaville 2017).
- 11.
Although, of course, this is a cover version: the original song was released by the English band Tears for Fears (1985), and is reimagined here in a contemporary ‘sadcore’ style.
- 12.
Prior to its use in Tidelands, Lorde’s cover also received prominent placements in a variety of other media contexts, including the soundtrack for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence, 2013).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the interview participants (Burkhard Dallwitz, Matteo Zingales, and Lynn Fainchtein) for their insightful comments on the role of music in their respective series, and Ashley Sewell (All Sorts Music) and Kate Dean (The SyncHouse) for the information they provided regarding the use of pre-existing music in the Australian screen music industry more widely. I am grateful to Dr Dave Ireland (University of Leeds) for his feedback on an early draft of this manuscript and Dr James Deaville (Carleton University) for his observations relating to the music of Tidelands.
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Huelin, T. (2022). Sounding Local? The Use of Music in Original Australian Streaming Productions. In: Samuel, M., Mitchell, L. (eds) Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_15
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