Why We Need More Gig Reviewers in the DIY Scene

This article appeared in issue one of the Nothing Sounds Good zine. Want to read the hard copy of future articles? Sign up today.

I’m being selfish. I’m writing this article because it’s something that I think will help DIY bands more, and I think it’ll help my band. However that doesn’t mean that this is something that isn’t an actual need.

Rewind to 2010. A generation brought up on Livejournal, Myspace, and MSN Messenger are getting into the adult world. They’ve gone through their formative years writing every thought and feeling into a text box on the internet, and looking for ways to make their mark. What better way to do it than get some free gig tickets and albums, and write reviews or interviews? I felt like this time was the heyday for street media and online music press. There were so many places writing about entertainment going on around them, from legit press like Timeout, to smaller press like Le Cool, DIY, Londonist, through to review sites like Qype and small indie blogs and zines. I even jumped on it for a while (albeit as a theatre critic), but it felt like everyone was writing about things happening!

Fast forward to 2025, and Timeout and NME are a shadow of what they used to be. Guardian’s The Guide, which used to be my little gig bible, is no more. Most of the smaller places have shut down. Why do I think this is such a problem? Well, there are two views that I think are important: the punter’s view and the artist’s view.

From a punter’s perspective, having a plethora of gig and music reviews means that you have multiple sources you can hear about things. Back in Sydney, Brag and Drum Media were the two sources of both gigs and new music that I trusted. I found so much of the music I still love in those pages. When I moved to London in 2009, I similarly trusted a handful of websites and street press to let me know what the heck was going on and what I might want to pay attention to. But the reviews side of it helped guide me to the new things. Not only did I look for people I trusted to guide me to new things (Kate Hutchison at Timeout was one of my favourites), but also a handful of people who I loved to hate also guided me to things that they hated so I might like.

However, it’s on the artist side that I really think we’re missing out. As an artist, gig reviews are one of the best ways we can sell ourselves to other promoters who might not have heard of us yet. Having a trusted word saying something nice about you is like gold dust. We all know this, even subconsciously. In the marketing/business world it’s called social proof — a psychological phenomenon in which people validate their actions by copying the behavior of others. It feels icky when put that way, but the truth is it works. On a personal level, nice words about the band also make us want to keep doing what we do. There is so little of a feedback loop between smaller artists and their fans these days, that sometimes it gets a little demotivating to be playing all these gigs and not really knowing if anyone actually likes what you’re doing. That little serotonin bump can mean that someone will keep doing what they love to do a bit longer.

Sure, we have TikTok and social media these days, but even that I feel has dropped off, with people only really posting things that they know will push their own platform and agenda. It feels like everything has got a bit me, me, me. Also, searching for those things is pretty shit these days. Written word is still the easiest thing to find and reproduce.

So this is my call to arms — start a blog. Start reviewing gigs on Reddit. Contact some publications and offer your services. You might just make a band you love keep doing it for a little bit longer.

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