GoKawiilThe sound went quiet: how New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it
In the third week of June 2026, two announcements landed on Karangahape Road within hours of each other. Flying Out, the record store that had anchored the strip for 11 years, said it was done. Then Neck of the Woods, the basement venue that launched a decade of Auckland electronic careers, posted that after 11 years of fighting increasing debt, it had reached the end.
The community refused to accept the second one. Nearly 3,000 people, including The Beths, put $150,000 into a Givealittle page in under a week, and Neck of the Woods reopened in July. It was a rare win in a bad run. Verona went into liquidation in April after 34 years. Charlie's closed in February. Bar Celeste closed the year before. The Others Way Festival, K Road's own street festival, was cancelled in May for the foreseeable future.
Here is the question almost nobody asked: who was covering any of this?
Karangahape Road after dark, the spine of Auckland's live-music culture. Photo: Prosperosity / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
The coverage collapsed first
Before the venues started closing, the people whose job it was to write about them had already gone.
The numbers are stark. When the NZ Herald still ran Time Out, its Thursday entertainment magazine, it had a team of dedicated writers. The magazine is gone and so are the jobs. Rip It Up and Real Groove, the magazines that documented decades of New Zealand music, are long dead. Chris Schulz, the journalist who has documented this decline more thoroughly than anyone and who won the Taite Award for Outstanding Music Journalism in 2025 for that work, puts it plainly: the number of music journalists left in Aotearoa can be counted on one hand, and there are no full-time music critics left at any major publication in the country.
The Spinoff called it in 2023 with a headline that said the sound is off for New Zealand music. Creative New Zealand's New Mirrors research found that arts and culture receive around 13 percent of total media coverage in Aotearoa, against roughly 25 percent for sport, and coverage of art forms outside film, music and TV sits at barely 3 percent.
This is not a New Zealand quirk. It is the local edge of a global collapse. Pitchfork, the most influential music publication in the world, was folded into GQ in 2024 and its editor-in-chief was laid off. Local music press has been gutted in the US, the UK and Australia. New Zealand just got there first and hardest, because we were small to begin with.
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