Live Music Funding Days after Kevin Rudd attended a live music fund-raising dinner in Melbourne, the federal government has announced it will spend $560,000 over three years on a new National Office for Live Music. The money will also pay for a national taskforce to come up with ideas to support live music. Mr Rudd attended Marieke Hardy's Dream Dinner on Tuesday night, a fund-raiser for the SLAM (Save Our Live Music) campaign, along with Gotye, Jebediah's frontman Kevin Mitchell, Andrew Denton and Matt Preston. Most say they owed their careers to live music. "My career has been built completely on top of being part of a healthy live music community," he says. When I first started playing music with Jebediah in Perth in 1995 we never talked about making records, we just dreamed of playing gigs at all our favourite venues that we'd gone to see our favourite bands play in before us. Performing live got us the attention of record companies. We never made a single demo recording. New South Wales ambassador Dave Faulkner, frontman for the Hoodoo Gurus, says: "A healthy live music scene is crucial to the cultural richness of any city. Matt Lambert (aka Suffa) of the Hilltop Hoods, who is representing South Australia, says the decline in digital sales makes it essential to keep a strong live music scene. "Without touring income, a lot of artists wouldn't be able to sustain a career as a full-time musician," he says. Lambert says many venues in South Australia see poker machines as "a more appealing" source of income. "But the reasons for supporting live music scene shouldn't just be purely financial," he says. As a country, we should be looking to foster our talent and create an environment where artists not only flourish, they spearhead our cultural growth. Katie Noonan, the Queensland ambassador, says the live music scene "is the backbone" of every working musician. Music has the power to connect us like nothing else can - and a live gig brings people together and helps define our culture and sense of community. Leah Flanagan is the ambassador for the Northern Territory, Kav Temperley (Eskimo Joe) for Western Australia, and Dewayne Everettsmith for Tasmania. NSW also has Stavros Yiannoukas (Bluejuice).