I Am Very Busy and Important.
Hi, my name's Sophie Benjamin.
I'm a writer, multimedia producer and occasional musician.
I'm often very busy, but ultimately not very important.
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Views expressed here are mine, or those of people I've overheard. They are not the views of my employer or clients.

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Writing for Fasterlouder - a ladder-climbing regret.

Working for free is an unavoidable part of starting out in any career. Whether you want to be a writer or a surgeon, you have to pay your dues and work hard to make your name before you start getting financially rewarded.

I was nineteen years old when I started my journalism degree. I wanted desperately to improve my writing.  It was a motive that naive, combined with my love of music that led me to sign up as a contributor for Fasterlouder and then-fledgling music blog whothehell.net.

It’s three years on.  I still blog for whothehell, and deeply  regret writing for Fasterlouder.

Fasterlouder doesn’t pay their contributors but that’s not my beef- whothehell doesn’t pay either.

My beef is that Fasterlouder churns through unpaid contributors in the name of being “Australia’s leading independent live music hub”, without giving these writers any guidance as to how they could improve their writing and exploiting the bands they write about by requesting door spots for their writers.  My work was rarely proof-read, let alone edited.  At least my first dozen posts on whothehell were edited and checked by editor Jerry Soer before I was given my own login.

I busted my arse writing about  shows I didn’t pay to attend, and in return I wasn’t paid for my efforts. My copy also wasn’t edited or proof-read, which is why the site isn’t (or shouldn’t be)  held in particularly high esteem. I attracted trolls and did my fair share of trolling.

Some of my writing for FL was  great, some of it was  shithouse, but all of it was  detrimental to the Brisbane scene. Not because I praised some bands and criticised others, but because I chose to give my content away  to such a dirty operator.

When venues shut down, when bands chuck it in, when street press publications aggregate content and fill columns with ads instead of editorial - these things are indirectly my fault. Sure, I graduated to being paid to write for street press on the back of my FasterLouder portfolio, but looking back, it’s clear that my success was at the expense of hard working bands. That’s something I’m not proud of.

So, as an older and wiser music lover, I’d like to say sorry to the bands I reviewed during my nine months of contribution to the site.

Sorry Luke Steele, An Horse, The Paper and The Plane  and  Scott Spark.
Sorry to The Rational Academy, Ambitious Lovers, Tragic/Athletic, Nova Scotia, Monster Monster and  Cam Smith of Before Hollywood/Stranded compilation fame.
Sorry to The Boat People, Abbe May, The John Steel Singers and Jeff Lang,  sorry to The Gin Club, Conor Oberst and I Heart Hiroshima.
Sorry to The Butterfly Effect, Trial Kennedy, Sleep Parade, Black Mustang, Repeat Offender, Ruby Tigers and Stone Parade. Yes, even Stone Parade.

I’m sorry I undercut and undermined you guys, even (and especially) those of you I really liked.

I’d like to borrow and bastardise the words of S.G Tallentyre:

“I [may] disapprove of what you play, I but I will defend to the  death your right to play it.”

Play on, players. Haters gonna hate.

ADDENDUM: This is not an attack on my editors. They were overworked, underpaid and undersourced. I know Shan Welham went to the effort of compiling and distributing a style guide.

Original Article