Andrew Weber

Andrew Weber uses accountability reporting to show how decisions in government and industry shape the music ecosystem in and around Austin. He reports for KUT as its government accountability reporter while also serving as a freelance reporter and associate editor for KUT News across the public radio network. His music stories track power, money and working conditions, focusing on musicians’ pay at festivals, access to health care and the fallout from institutional choices that affect venues and artists. Alongside this music-focused work, he covers government and institutional stories such as the firing of KUT’s general manager Debbie Hiott and the broader relationship between the station and the University of Texas.

Bands at SXSW are calling for better pay

Weber’s coverage of South by Southwest treats the festival as a workplace and an economic system rather than a purely cultural event. He has reported that bands playing SXSW are paid about $250 while organizers make profits, documenting how musicians argue that exposure no longer compensates for low fees.

In related reporting on artists boycotting the festival over its partnership with the U.S. Army and major defense contractors, he connects booking decisions and sponsorships to broader political and ethical concerns. These stories show a consistent focus on who benefits financially from the city’s showcase festivals and how those arrangements shape the lives of working musicians.

His SXSW and musician-pay reporting is carried across multiple public radio stations, underscoring his role as a freelance reporter and associate editor whose work circulates widely in the network.

Live music shows are coming back to Austin - but venues are still waiting for federal relief

During the pandemic and its aftermath, Weber has reported on the uneven return of live music, highlighting venues that reopened while still waiting on promised federal relief funding.

He frames reopening as an economic and policy story, tracing how delays in aid affect independent venues and the performers who rely on them for income. In reflections accompanying this coverage, he notes that he plays music on the side and has close friends who perform professionally, an experience that informs his sensitivity to the stakes for working artists without turning his reporting into memoir.

This blend of lived familiarity with the scene and a structural focus on funding makes his live music work distinct from more promotional or purely cultural coverage.

After shutting off mental health care for Austin musicians

Weber’s collaboration with Austin Monitor on the SIMS Foundation shows how he follows the support systems behind the music scene as closely as the performances themselves.

He reported on the foundation’s pause in providing low-cost and free mental health services for musicians, then on its decision to restart services after a fundraising campaign reached a half-million-dollar goal. The story details organizational decisions, financial targets and the practical impact on clients, explaining how a months-long gap in care ended and what that meant for artists returning to therapy. By focusing on mental health infrastructure and the nonprofits that underpin the scene, he extends music reporting beyond coverage of shows and releases into the realm of social services and long-term sustainability for musicians.

Austin musicians compose musical piece played inside a dumpster

Weber also spends time in the more experimental corners of Austin’s music community, including artists who staged a performance inside smoking dumpsters to memorialize the “dumpster fire” of 2020. In his coverage of that piece, he introduces the sound-art collective Rolling Ryot, charting its evolution from bike-based performances to a dedicated space and describing how discarded renovation materials became instruments.

The story emphasizes texture and process, with Weber protecting his own ears at the performance while translating the sensory experience into accessible audio and written reporting.

His segment on the Pause/Play podcast situates that dumpster concert within a wider conversation about the return of live music, showing his ability to move between intimate vignettes and scene-wide trends in a single body of work. Earlier in his career at KUT he worked as a digital producer, editing stories, writing breaking news for the web and managing social media, earning a national Edward R.

Murrow award for social media work that included live coverage and interactive features. That background in digital storytelling and engagement underpins the way he brings unusual music stories to a broad audience without losing their local specificity.