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MusicSA

organisation for promoting contemporary music in South Australia

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ85787174
Source-derived summary

MusicSA, originally AusMusic SA, is a non-profit organisation whose aims are to promote, support and develop contemporary music in South Australia. It was formerly legally registered as South Australian Contemporary Music Company Ltd. It presents the annual South Australian Music Awards, puts on the two-week celebration of live music, Umbrella: Winter City Sounds, and organises a number of other musical events throughout the year. It also provides training, professional development advice, and live performance opportunities for musicians.

History

AusMusic SA was established on 23 July 1997 as the South Australian Contemporary Music Development Company, trading as AusMusic SA. In 2004, Music SA Online was established, and in 2005 the organisation started the Contemporary Music Program in 29 secondary schools. From 2007 to 2010, it ran the Louder Than Words Festival in regional SA, and from 2008 to 2012 the Coopers Alive Festival. It also managed the Fuse Festival.

In 2010, MusicSA became a registered training organisation, and in the same year AusmusicSA was re-branded as MusicSA. The organisation engaged in several collaborations with other partners, such as Flinders University, the Australian Independent Record Labels Association (AIR) Awards, and local radio stations, and has also published several guides relevant to the contemporary music industry.

In 2015 Lisa Bishop (who is also deputy chair of Adelaide Fringe and a film producer), became CEO/general manager of MusicSA.

In 2015 MusicSA took over responsibility for the Fowlers Live Music Awards, renamed the South Australian Music Awards (or SA Music Awards).

Umbrella: Winter City Sounds, a two-week live music festival, was launched in 2016, which in 2017 put on 300 events, funded by the Australia Council and the South Australian Tourism Commission and has been an annual event, until the cancellation in 2020 owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “MusicSA” is organisation for promoting contemporary music in South Australia. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through MusicSA, organisation and promoting, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1997, 2004, 2005, 2007—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, MusicSA, organisation and promoting is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “organisation for promoting contemporary music in South Australia” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85787174. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2004, 2005 and 2007.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “MusicSA”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow MusicSA primary sources, MusicSA archive and MusicSA research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “MusicSA”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from MusicSA” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.