Conor Lochrie
Conor Lochrie is a music and culture journalist whose work follows the machinery around artists – awards, festivals, industry rules, and the people who keep those systems running. He writes news and features for The Music Network and sister titles, connecting changes in categories, lineups, and policy to their impact on musicians and creatives. He holds a deputy editor role across Rolling Stone AU/NZ, Variety AU/NZ, Tone Deaf, and The Music Network, after several years as a freelance writer covering music, cinema, and travel for international outlets.
Industry news and award ceremonies
At The Music Network, Lochrie focuses on music industry news with a strong emphasis on award shows and institutional decision-making. His coverage of the Recording Academy’s rule changes for the Grammy Awards, including the addition of five new categories like Best Asian Pop Music Performance and Best Latin Song and revised guidelines for Best New Artist and album eligibility, shows his interest in how global structures adapt to new genres and career paths. He writes this type of story in clear, accessible language, translating dense rulebooks into straightforward implications for artists and labels.
His author archive at The Music Network includes pieces such as “Finalists Revealed for 2026 Sunshine Coast Music Awards,” marking him out as a regular reporter on local and regional music prizes. He also covers developments in the broader screen and creative industries, filing award news like entries opening for the 2027 AACTA Awards and tracking how major ceremonies position themselves through venue decisions and category changes. Across these articles, he treats awards as more than red-carpet events, framing them as systems that can help or hinder emerging talent.
Australian festivals, lineups, and live music
Lochrie’s reporting at The Music Network extends to festivals and live events, where he often writes the first public word on new lineups and programming. Headlines such as “Night at the Barracks 2026 Lineup Revealed” show him announcing bills and highlighting how promoters balance heritage acts with contemporary names. These stories sit at the juncture of industry and fan interest: they provide essential information for the business side while reflecting the excitement of audiences watching a scene grow.
He brings the same attention to detail to coverage of other local events and series, regularly tracking how venues, councils, and organizers support live performance. The consistency of these news pieces – awards finalists, lineup reveals, series launches – suggests a reporter who sees live music as an ecosystem, and who is attentive to how infrastructure decisions shape the opportunities available to artists.
Artist-focused features and scene reporting
Alongside hard news, Lochrie writes artist-led features that spotlight the human side of the music industry. At The Music Network he profiles professionals such as “Spotlight: At work with Emily Nicol, Radio and Digital Producer,” focusing on day-to-day craft and career paths within broadcasting and digital production. These stories show his interest in the often-unseen workers who support artists and help music reach audiences.
For Rolling Stone AU/NZ he contributes to ongoing series like “In My Room with IVY,” an atmospheric session with a rising Dunedin alternative rock band, combining performance documentation with scene reporting. In these pieces he places artists in the context of their local communities, paying attention to sound, setting, and the networks that allow niche genres to thrive. His work for Tone Deaf, including coverage such as Iron Maiden discussing their documentary “Burning Ambition,” extends this artist focus to global acts, where he frames legacy bands through new projects and storytelling rather than nostalgia alone.
Earlier in his career he built a portfolio as a freelance music and film writer, filing reviews and features for outlets including The Line of Best Fit, Exclaim!, Euphoria, Our Culture Mag, Clash, The Skinny, Vague Visages, and Cultured Vultures. That breadth across indie music, genre cinema, and pop culture informs the way he now writes about artists for his current mastheads, moving easily between emerging local names and internationally established acts.
Creative industries, copyright, and technology
Lochrie also covers the pressures facing creative workers, especially around copyright and technological change. On Rolling Stone AU/NZ he has reported from Parliament House on Australian creatives’ stance on AI and authorship, in a piece headlined “Artists Can Never Be Replaced by Technology”: Australian Creatives Hold Firm on Copyright and AI. In that work he treats policy debates as artist stories, quoting creators and framing legal and technological shifts through their lived experience.
This strand of his reporting complements his awards and rules coverage. Whether writing about Grammys eligibility criteria or national discussions around AI and copyright, he focuses on how formal decisions translate into everyday realities for musicians, songwriters, and other creative professionals. For communications teams, his body of work shows a journalist interested in the junction of art and structure: ceremonies, contracts, technologies, and how all of these shape the careers of the people making music.
4 more music journalists.
Abby Webster
Abby Webster zeroes in on the storytelling side of contemporary pop, writing for Billboard about how songs build worlds around K-pop groups, fictional pop stars and ambitious soundtracks. She covers K-pop projects through close, song-by-song features, like her track-by-track piece with SEVENTEEN’s Vernon and The 8 on their EP ‘V8,’ and fan-centered lists such as “7 Best Moments from BTS’ Long-Awaited Return.” She treats soundtracks and fictional acts with the same rigor, mapping the inspirations behind “The Vampire Lestat” soundtrack and profiling in-universe groups like HUNTR/X and Saja Boys as if they were chart acts. Through Chart Beat stories on projects like “KPop Demon Hunters,” she connects these releases to industry strategy, global fandom, and the business systems that turn pop narratives into durable IP.
Alex Suskind
Alex Suskind is a freelance writer and editor who covers music with concise news stories and curated release lists. He focuses on new songs, album roundups, and archival access, from Carly Rae Jepsen’s “On Wires” to Neil Young opening his full catalog to residents of Greenland. His reporting stays close to the release cycle and foregrounds the core hook of each story. He has written for Pitchfork and has freelance work in Vulture, The Guardian, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic. He also covers broader arts and culture, but his music beat is built around what is newly out now or newly available.
Ali Shutler
Ali Shutler links chart pop, alternative music and fan culture with the ways songs move through festivals, streaming platforms and games. He is a freelance culture journalist specialising in music, writing news and features for NME and other music and culture titles. He covers breakout chart acts, legacy artists whose catalogues are resurfacing, and how audiences rediscover songs via TikTok, streaming or in‑game soundtracks. His reporting on streaming-era pop and live festival moments tracks virality, catalog access and fan behaviour as part of the story of a track. He also examines music, gaming and visual art crossovers, treating game soundtracks and artist-led campaigns as part of a wider cultural map. Alongside this, he profiles emerging chart artists for outlets including The Telegraph, Vice, The Independent, Dork and Upset, focusing on early-career trajectories and fan culture.
Annette Sharp
Annette Sharp is a veteran gossip and entertainment columnist known for direct, opinion-led coverage of celebrity power struggles and reputational crises across television and the music industry. She now writes high-profile columns for the masthead, after a decade on a well-read gossip column and a move to News Corp in 2008. Her real beat is the friction between public image and behind-the-scenes behaviour on flagship TV programs, including breakfast shows, reality formats and other long-running franchises. She focuses on who drives conflicts, who is exposed and who benefits, using ratings history, production decisions and industry mechanics as context. Sharp covers on-air personalities, executives, advisers and musicians, treating television and music as workplaces with competing egos, contracts and alliances, and blending reporting, media commentary and critique in a narrative column format.