Russell Baillie: 'Support kiwi music' a hypnotic mantra

Altogether now: Support kiwi music, support kiwi music ...

Hypnotic isn't it? Very. Make you feel good about living in this far flung part of Planet Pop? Good.

It's a mantra the Labour Government has chanted since taking office. Politically, it's worked a treat among the creative sector and the youth vote.

Every year, Helen Clark turns up at the our music awards to the sort of reception that she would only otherwise get on the closing night of a party annual conference.

That mantra got another outing this week with Broadcasting Minister Steve Maharey's announcement of a rescue plan for the ailing Kiwi FM which CanWest had moved to shut after a little over a year on air.

He was giving free frequencies to CanWest to turn the ratings disaster into a not-for-profit network. How that deal was formulated is as much of a puzzle as how it might work.

It is, as Neil Finn pointed out in a letter to this paper, politically self-serving. Especially with its timing for the first week of this New Zealand Music Month.

Even with a promise of more specialist shows (funded by NZ On Air, as is in various ways much of the station's contemporary playlist), the move isn't going to fix Kiwi's greatest drawback.

The thought that the enthusiasm for all things NZ music would translate to a listenership for Kiwi FM has been proved wrong by its miniscule audience. Why? The most obvious explanation is its haphazard playlist, one which has to marry the past to the present, leap from genre-to-genre between songs and pretend that its listeners only like the local stuff. Music appreciation doesn't work that way. Neither does radio station loyalty.

The station was a brave and well-meaning idea. But it was one stuck in the past, to a time before New Zealand music went mainstream. Before local commercial radio, with a fair chunk of it owned by CanWest, embraced local music after being encouraged to do so by a combination of government policy through NZ On Air and a local music industry who started cajoling programmers with music they could playlist rather than shouting at them for not listening.

The problem with a back-from-the-dead Kiwi FM is what it says about NZ music. It's already failed once and helped create the perception no-one wants to listen to NZ music when the happy reality is they do. Not just all at once.

Maharey says that specialist shows will help cure its playlist woes. Those programmes will be funded by NZ On Air, which surely is more throwing good money after bad considering how narrow those programmes will have to be ("coming right up after NZ Country show we've got the NZ Western show").

New Zealand music is in good heart. Government-backed bodies like NZ On Air and the New Zealand Music Industry Commission are helping acts on both the domestic front and the international trail. Yes, if you're a starving musician in this country under this Labour government, it's because you haven't been given the right form to fill out.

Arguably, we don't even need a New Zealand Music Month any more - the war's been won.

But a casualty of that battle is that Kiwi is a dead duck. The government paying someone to have it stuffed and put it under glass isn't going to make it quack any louder.

It might be that some good will come of the Kiwi rescue - the Finn-backed campaign for a non-commercial youth network could make its way back on to the agenda.