Inaugural Community Member Q&A: Tim Shiel, broadcaster, musician and producer

By: Cherie HuKatherine Bassett

Published: 2021-06-20

As our community grows, we thought you’d appreciate learning a little bit more about fellow members’ work and careers, especially as career paths in the music business become increasingly diverse, forward-looking and cross-disciplinary.

With that in mind, we’re excited to launch a new, semi-regular editorial series called Community Member Q&As —consisting of brief interviews with Water & Music members,with the goal of highlighting how people from a diverse range of backgrounds, career paths and industry perspectives are thinking about music and technology today. As a community benefit, this series will be available to all paying members ($3/month and above).

Our first member Q&A below is with Tim Shiel — a self-described “human who specializes in music, tech and talking,” based in Melbourne, Australia. Tim has had quite a varied career within the music industry, across the following roles:

Tim also graciously hosted Cherie as a panel speaker in Spirit Level’s Future of Music series on Twitch last year (the full series archive is on YouTube).

We caught up with Tim to discuss various aspects of his career thus far, his unique position within the music industry and what his biggest concerns are in the world of music and tech as we slowly emerge from the pandemic. Major themes that emerged from this Q&A include the importance of centering human beings rather than tech platforms as the main drivers of cultural change, and the value of hearing from artists operating outside dominant, profit-driven industry structures when imagining new futures for music and tech.

W&M: You’ve worn several hats within the music industry, as a musician, producer, broadcaster, label manager and video game composer. How has having experienced so many different perspectives informed the way you view the music industry as a whole?

Tim Shiel: I tend to think of the “music industry” as simply the commercially-driven tip of a much more interesting cultural and creative iceberg. In the book Can Music Make You Sick, they call it the “music ecosystem” instead, and I’ve been trying to more explicitly make the distinction between those two things when I think about all this.

Most of the music ecosystem sits outside of the mainstream view — often actively, willfully so — and therefore it can be a giant blind spot to people working in “the industry.” Simply put, a lot of people working in the broader cultural ecosystem are not motivated or driven by the same values that drive those working inside the “industry.” Many artists — arguably, most artists — don’t get involved in music to make money or chase commercial outcomes, but are driven by something personal or cultural, i.e. a desire to learn, to express themselves and grow, to create broader change in their community or society. This tension between the intangible and very human drivers that actually motivate artists to do their work, versus the economic imperatives that drive the businesses that make up our “industry” — that tension is a key reason why we have an ongoing mental health crisis amongst artists.

Your triple j show Something More focuses on unearthing experimental new music — the music that “falls through the cracks,” as your show notes put it. What platforms do you personally use to discover new music? What are the “cracks” that you think still exist today in terms of music/artists that are getting overlooked?

I am becoming increasingly militant about getting my recommendations from humans, and not from algorithms or platforms. I tend to feel like I understand the motivations and the context of an individual’s curation better than I can a platform.

Like many people right now, I’ve grown so suspicious of platforms whose motivations I can’t readily understand. I’m done assuming that platforms somehow know me or know what’s best for me; that is a dangerous, precarious and potentially powerless position to be in. I think people are increasingly aware that platforms have their own vested interests in guiding you towards this choice or that choice, and that those interests rarely actually align with what is best for you as a listener, or for the artist/creator class, despite what the messaging from the platform might be. I want my curation to be informed by community and by my own values, rather than informed by whatever surfaces in an algorithm or is placed in front of me by a platform with its own vested interests. I’m trying to become more conscious of who I choose to let myself be guided by or influenced by, but it is an ongoing process.

In terms of why most music is overlooked — obviously the easiest answer is that there is more of it than ever. Cultural abundance is a really intense phenomenon, and I think it’s still under-discussed and under-appreciated in its effects. Abundance of music (and of information in general) has been harnessed so devastatingly effectively for the accumulation of capital by a handful of tech companies; outside of that, I don’t think we tend to think about abundance very meaningfully. Whether it’s our ability to generate information/content/art, or the way in which we talk about and think about the people who do the generating (which at this point, we understand that to basically include everyone) — neither of these things have really evolved in line with our technological ability to churn information out. Our animal brains and our social discourse have not caught up with where we are at. So we have a lot of catching up to do, and I don’t have the answers obviously.

What I do know is that, ironically, now is when we need artists more than ever to be independent-minded and fully supported — to help us understand, contextualize, process and reflect on the times we live in. We need to empower artists to lead and to imagine new and better futures, and this may not necessarily be achieved by tinkering inside existing economic and commercial structures. I still feel like I have so much to learn but personally this is where my focus is going, and part of that is speaking up and trying to start some different kinds of conversations, so we can find new futures.

You’ve used Twitch extensively over the last year, from interviewing several music executives and leaders (including Cherie!) to creating music in real time during streams. What have been some of the biggest takeaways from this experience for you, in terms of understanding the value of Twitch, livestreaming, virtual panels, etc.?

I find Twitch a really curious place, and am drawn to it partly because of my broadcasting background but also because I have a soft spot for gamers and an affinity with the kind of intense nerds who stake out positions there. I like streamers who use it as a playground for new ideas — for example, streamers like Sushi Dragon or the Cardboard Cowboy feel like they are creating a form of entertainment that has never existed before. That excites me much more than trying to replicate existing ideas like live concerts and industry panels.

You composed the original soundtrack for the game The Gardens Between(2018, pictured above). Based on your experience, what are the main differences between composing music for video games versus more “traditional” music composition?

The most obvious difference is simply that writing conventional music is linear. A song has a beginning, a middle and an end, and is usually codified on a sound recording as being the “definitive version.” Composing for video games (most of the time) is non-linear: Even though I might be making things that eventually become locked in recordings, inside the game they are broken into pieces that get triggered and manipulated by player interaction. As a composer, it is really freeing to be able to work in that way. For me, it felt very natural, though for many I think it can be a bit of a cognitive leap.

I think appreciating the role a gamer has in literally shaping the music as they experience it, whether they realize it or not, has actually helped me appreciate the role of the listener even in a more conventional context. Music isn’t “music” until it is listened to by someone, and the experience of even a “linear” piece of music is going to be defined differently every single time by that person and the moment they are in — the choices they make and who they are.

In your view, what do you think are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the music industry in the coming months, as we gradually emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic?

I know how hard COVID has hit certain segments of the music industry — but for me, I actually think that it is worth us thinking about how many challenges artists were facing even before COVID came. I don’t want to lose sight of that.

Many artists and workers in the creative industries were existing in psychological and financial precarity well before the pandemic arrived, and I think the role of the artist in our society has been undervalued for a very long time in some very fundamental ways. I worry that focusing on COVID recovery from an industry or business perspective risks obscuring the bigger challenges that we still don’t have a sufficient response for.

The way all people have leaned on art as a support resource throughout recent crisis and trauma has been reassuring and hopefully it goes some way to reaffirming the role of art in society, that it provides a deep positive impact to us all that cannot always be measured in an economic context. I hope that this time has provided the opportunity for people working inside the industry to reassess their relationship to artists, to think about what truly drives and motivates them, and to think about what they can do to help artists bring positive change into the world.

What kinds of emerging tech are most exciting and/or concerning to you right now, and why?

Following on from above, I’ve found myself becoming rapidly less interested in tech, and more interested in humans. There is no shortage of amazing shiny new things, and honestly I find a lot of it really, really fun, but I guess I’ve been focusing more recently on trying to get my head straight and trying to return to some first principles and values, and work from there. Broadly, I find myself most concerned with the ways in which the largest tech companies in the world are reshaping human behavior to pursue their own agendas. Music is far from immune here.

What music are you listening to right now?

The Something More playlist. 😉 It’s cheating, but when people ask me what music I’m listening to, I point them to my radio show.