The Music & Booze Company: Two Worlds Colliding
Sydney’s music scene is defined by the city’s venues and event spaces. This has resulted in an overlap between the hospitality and music industries, as the city’s live music flourishes through pubs and bars. The Music & Booze Company operates in the space between these two worlds. This small business, running out of an office space above the Whitehorse Hotel in Newtown, combines veteran experience in the Inner-West pub scene with a genuine passion for music, resulting in a diverse, multifaceted company. Since its creation in 2014, the business has accumulated multiple branches to include event promotion, music agency and liquor licensing.
On the company’s inception, Founder Matt Rule explains:
“Well we had the Annandale Hotel for about 13 years, my brother and I. That finished in 2013. It’s funny, when you run a music venue, particularly a pub, you straddle the liquor industry and the music industry. Once that finished, we felt there was a position available for us to use the skillset and connections we made in the liquor industry and also the many contacts we got in music. Hence, the Music & Booze Company started.”
Approaching music from the liquor industry has resulted in outstanding success for Music & Booze. Through their music and licencing connections, the company began building bars for music festivals, like Fairgrounds Festival, Mountain Sounds and Output Festival. Following this initial phase, the Music and Booze Co. quickly gained more and more staff to diversift the business. After the Annandale Hotel went bankrupt, which Rule partly attributes to debt, Matt saw that having multiple properties and branches across music and licensing meant financial security in case something jeopardised his business.
“Whilst we went into the business with an idea, I wouldn’t say we went with a clear plan,” explained Rule. “I wanted to learn lessons from the Annandale. From that I learnt, start from zero with no debt. Whether it was ten years or two years, I wanted to build a business that would sustain itself. At the heart of it, what we want to do is own our own festivals and look after our own artists and do various things, because the more we own the safer our long-term business is going to be. Over the years it’s just progressed very organically.”
One of the significant ways Rule expanded his business was through taking their experience in festival licensing to create their own events. This has directly resulted in the Bad Friday festival, which has run annually since 2010. It was originally only a small line-up of artists at the Annandale Hotel, conceived so an at-the-time album-less Sticky Fingers could secure a gig. Following the closure of the Annandale in 2013, the event moved to the Vic on the Park in Marrickville, before outgrowing the pub in 2017 and becoming a sold-out ticketed event in Railway Parade. Stemming from that initial promotion of Sticky Fingers, the festival has remained entirely local, with some of the area’s biggest names, like the Gang of Youths, Jezebels and DMAs, all making early appearances at Bad Friday. With thousands in attendance last year, Bad Friday has cemented itself within the Newtown music scene.
“Everything we do, we think ‘can this be an event that can go on and are we creating something that can last’” said Matt. “Bad Friday started at the Annandale and we did 10 years last year. We feel it’s got a place in the community that we can build from.”
The other big event in the Music and Booze Co. calendar is the King Street Crawl, which has run since 2015. The concept came from a 2004 trip to SXSW in Austin, where Rule walked into a bar to find Powderfinger, The Bronx and John Butler Trio performing. The experience of seeing extremely talented bands in local venues at the same time eventually led Rule to the King Street Crawl, a one-day event where multiple bars across Newtown, Enmore, St. Peters and Erskineville host hours of live music from local bands. Last year, over 150 artists played across more than thirty venues, cementing it as one of the most unique and fun days of the year.
On organising such a big event across multiple venues, Rule explained:
“Initially it was a lot of footwork, but 5 years running now, it’s easier. We aren’t chasing people to convince them of what the concept is and what the benefits are. Getting spaces is getting easier. Problem now is that we haven’t got enough spaces, so we’re looking at expanding it again.”
A recurring theme in the Music and Booze Co. business model is its connection to the inner west community. Through the Newtown music scene and Rule’s experience in pubs, the community helped shaped the business. Now that events like the King Street Crawl and Bad Friday have grown, the business is helping to shape the community.
