III. MUSIC CD-ROM PRODUCTION IN AUSTRALIA
a. 1994 - The Year of Emergence
On October 14th 1994 the Australian prime minister Paul Keating publicly launched a new cultural policy statement which galvanised interest in multimedia forms such as the CD-Rom in Australia. This policy, named 'Creative Nation' by its publicists, marked a break-through in cultural funding in Australia. Unlike all previous cultural policy statements, it put new technology forms firmly on the agenda and - what's more - backed the agenda with hard cash, eighty million Australian dollars, available via the 'Multimedia' 10 funding initiative. Administered jointly by the federal departments of Employment, Education and Training (DEET); Communications and the Arts (DoCA); and Industry, Science and Technology (DIST), the initiative targeted a wide variety of 'multimedia' applications. As announced in the national press in early December, the initiative offered funding in five categories:
| a. Australian Multimedia Enterprises | $42.2M | ||||
| b. Interactive Multimedia Forums | $1.95M | ||||
| c. Co Operative multimedia development Centres | $20.28M | ||||
| d. Australia on CD programmes | $7.38M | ||||
| e. Film Industry involvement in new media | $7.24M | ||||
The technologies central to this admirably contemporary funding scheme were those deemed to be the next wave of media forms, those interactive systems commonly envisaged to replace the limited interactivity of TV/Video/Film etc. More specifically, the chief technologies comprised: computer software, interactive computer communication systems and CD-Roms. Along with the specific 'Australia on CD' project, the role CD-Rom technology played in the development of the initiative, and in the debates that followed the policy launch, illustrated the foothold the format had gained in Australia in 1993-4. This foothold, and 1994 as its year of establishment, was acknowledged on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald's weekly 'Computers and Communication' supplement on December 6th 1994, with the banner headline 'Dreaming of a byte Christmas' and the opening sentence "This is it - the first CD-Rom Christmas" (Robotham: 41).
b. PAMS and The Australian Music Industry
In Australia, the main agency involved in the development of music CD-Roms has been the Sydney-based company Pacific Advanced Media Studios (henceforth PAMS). PAMS was founded in 1992 by a group of people whose skills ranged from sound and video production to formal computer programming. The company have been involved in promoting the CD-Rom in Australia through a series of projects, promotions and the publication of the discussion paper 'Core Characteristics of a Viable Multimedia Industry'. The document, written in collaboration with their legal advisers Hooton and Perkins, was one of the few publicly available submissions on multimedia/CD Rom which fed into the 'Creative Nation' policy statement and its funding initiatives. The Australian Government's final policy statement can, at least in part, be seen as a positive response to PAMS/Hooton and Perkins' document; its recommendation of the need to address issues such as copyright and creator rights, project finance, digital media production methodology; and its summary statement that
| Australia has a once off window of opportunity in the next twelve months to foster the creation of a viable digital media industry which should then remain viable for the next twenty years. Should it not take this opportunity then it will be effectively locked out of this industry and will be relegated again to be a patchy bit player as it is in PC software. |
One of the company's first completed projects was Pools of Reflection, the CD-Rom made for a relatively unknown Sydney-based musician, Guy Delandro. Completed in October 1993, the disc was the first Australian music CD-Rom. Pools of Reflection primarily comprised a music section and expanded 'liner notes' with a small slice of live action video. From PAMS' point of view at least, it was primarily produced as demonstration piece for the company, attempting to interest the Australian music industry to the format. It was successful in this regard, in that PAMS received a significant number of inquiries about the costs and viability of similar projects shortly after its release and the publication of press reviews and articles about it. Despite initial resistance from record stores, Pools of Reflection was marketed through selected inner-city record shops, in standard CD (audio) racks. As befitting the novelty of its format, its cover packaging featured prominent information on how to access the music on the disc and how CD-Roms were designed to function.
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