We sat in a car park in her Northern Beaches suburb, down the road from her house and not far from the bottle shop where she works at her day job. She’s also studying nursing ‘in case music doesn’t work out’.
I talked with Arielle (TikTok: @ariellevs), a young indie-folk musician currently in the process of producing a debut single with a notable record label. She’s worked small local gigs and played at one major Australian music festival.
Her experience trying to break out as an artist has been ‘really difficult’, as she said simply. ‘I think the biggest thing with being in Sydney is everything moves really slow. When I first got discovered… it took a month for them to find somebody willing to work, especially with an underground artist.’
‘I think the biggest thing with being in Sydney is everything moves really slow.’
But as she also identifies, ‘if I were in, you know, LA or New York… it would have probably happened within a week… It’s easier to succeed overseas, for sure, I don’t necessarily know if overall success is impacted, but definitely the time it takes to be successful.’
She’s not imagining it. Look at The Kid LAROI, he was coming up locally, but it wasn’t until he moved to the US where he took off.
Arielle thinks it was luck that got her picked up by a label, and it’s luck that a lot of artists haven’t had. Making it in Australia is a slow, often painful process, something that many can’t stomach or afford. The draw to the faster-paced scenes of the US has made many Australian artists leave the lucky country.
