New tune to scouting fresh SA music talent
An almost decade-old bid to expose local musos to record labels has been scrapped with a new plan to get bands ready for the big league.
The music showcase Scouted, which put emerging artists in front of indie record label bosses, has been scrapped for 2026 and rebranded as The Scouted Sessions.
Scouted ran for nine years and programmed emerging local acts on stage at Indie-Con – a national music conference that brings independent record labels and music bosses to Adelaide in August.
“Putting emerging artists on stage in front of Indie-Con delegates wasn’t necessarily the right pairing,” MusicSA Christine Schloithe says about the change.
She says “not a lot” of Scouted artists were directly represented by the delegates, but it led to more exposure, more airplay and artists connecting with booking agents to eventually earn festival slots.
“But what we wanted to do was really not lose the opportunity for emerging artists [because] those opportunities to develop your career can be really rare and far between,” Schloithe says.
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The Scouted Sessions is an intensive career development program for up to 10 SA music acts.
Schloithe says MusicSA had “deliberately stepped away” from the live show element and would instead put those financial resources into professional coaching and other elements of the new program.
“The new Scouted program takes what was at the guts of the showcase opportunity and just puts it into a very different kind of framework,” MusicSA CEO Christine Schloithe says.
“Scouted Sessions isn’t a showcase, it’s sustained investment in artists, their goals and their next steps in a way that creates real career trajectory.”
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The bands or artists selected by an independent industry panel would still start the program at IndieCon to network and hear from guest speakers.
Over three months, the musos are then paired with industry experts for one-on-one mentoring and workshops that cover stagecraft, marketing and PR, touring pathways, artist management and deal-making.
At the end of it, each artist should have a strategic business plan for the next one to three years with achievable career goals.
“We’ll work with what the artist needs, rather than assuming all artists want the same kind of career outcomes,” Schloithe says.
Schloithe says MusicSA has noticed more diversity in the local scene recently, and she was looking forward to seeing another strong pool of applicants.
“Artists coming through are probably more diverse than what we’ve seen previously, and that’s really exciting,” she says.
“We would certainly be looking at a selection of diversity in the artists that we’re looking at in the styles of music, the genre of music, and the backgrounds that people are bringing into their music.”
There are 10 spots up for grabs for South Australian artists to apply. Expressions of interest are open until Wednesday, July 22 via the MusicSA website.
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