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News January 10, 2018

Community broadcasters, musicians and music companies flock to support The Republic of Amrap

Lars Brandle
Community broadcasters, musicians and music companies flock to support The Republic of Amrap

Reps from Inertia Music, Remote Control Records, SGC Media and hundreds more have thrust their support behind Amrap following news of its extraordinary split with the CBAA.

As previously reported in TIO, all six members of the Amrap team, including its manager Chris Johnson, have left the CBAA premises and are calling on the Community Broadcasting Foundation to resolve what it describes as a raft of conduct, governance and management issues.

Amrap was revitalised with federal government funding ten years ago to facilitate spins and exposure of homegrown music at community radio. Now, a newly-formed Republic of Amrap has emerged, with its staff volunteering their time and using personal resources for the immediate future.

Just 24 hours into the Republic of Amrap campaign, a whopping 500-plus letters of support have been sent to the Community Broadcasting Foundation, calling on the peak body to disentangle Amrap from the CBAA and action the solutions proposed by the Amrap staff.

More than a third of the letters have come from community broadcasters and station management, with the remainder from Australian musicians and music businesses of all stripes, TIO understands.

“The support letters so far prove that both the community radio and Australian music sectors support our common-sense solution to remove Amrap from the CBAA, and create a new and transparent structure to oversee the project,” Johnson tells TIO, which broke the story on Tuesday.

Johnson adds, “it’s great when someone ‘likes’ a social post, but it’s phenomenal when hundreds of Australian musicians, music businesses and community broadcasters take the time to write a letter to help us achieve a fair future for those who rely on Amrap services.”

Amrap has requested four points of action from the Community Broadcasting Foundation, which provides the Amrap management contract and funds to the CBAA. Those proposed solutions include cancelling the CBAA’s management of Amrap; putting Amrap into caretaker mode; collecting Amrap assets, funding and musicians’ fees that are held by the CBAA; and identifying a new management structure for Amrap that consists of qualified community radio and Australian music experts.

Read more here.

Meanwhile, Amrap has responded to the CBAA, in particular addressing its claim Tuesday that Johnson had referred to a “draft future proposed model made available to all staff in late 2017.”

A statement issued Wednesday morning from the Amrap staff reads: “The CBAA’s restructure is well beyond draft form. It commenced rollout in December 2017, and is due for completion by June 2018. It ignored recommendations provided by the Amrap team during the single 50 minute group meeting that they were allocated throughout the consultation process.”

The message continues, “The position to maintain Amrap’s proven effective self-contained structure was continually reiterated by Amrap’s dedicated advisory committee of music and community radio sector experts. They governed Amrap for over 17 years until they were disbanded by the Community Broadcasting Foundation in late 2016. Less than a year later, the CBAA has advanced a restructure that ignored their advice, the advice given by other stakeholders at the 2016 Amrap Think Tank, and the common-sense approach that all Amrap resources and funds must be used for their funded purpose of supporting Australian music through community radio.”

In another development, the Republic of Amrap has shared a new video which explains their reasons for defecting from its management parent. The clip, which can be seen below, uses jelly beans as currency to illustrate the inefficient structure under CBAA’s new proposals.

Watch the clip below:

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.

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