Omid Master to play Sunset Music Festival
Tuesday September 17 2013
Master of the 21st Century
Mossman musician and this year’s Sunset in the Park festival head act, Omid Master, is well aware of the impact of modern technology on the music scene.
Since his days playing gigs at school fetes in his late teens, Master has experienced first-hand the changes, including self-promotion through social media and YouTube, and he’s embracing every aspect.
“Music has changed so much,” he muses over a glass of Persian tea at the back of his Persian carpet shop on Macrossan Street.
"You make a video clip and that’s how you can promote your clip globally, via YouTube. Rage and Australia MTV are national, but YouTube is constant [and] it’s virtually your own TV channel.”
The video clip to which he’s referring is his latest that accompanies his new single, I Won’t Burn For You, available to download on iTunes and 
featured on The Newsport recently.
The song, about Master’s house surviving when the neighbors’ completely burned down in 2003, has been five years in the making and features an exciting range of instruments including Master on the didgeridoo. The song was completed with the help of his brother, Mobin Master, a record producer, and friend and long-term lyricist, Helen Ramoutsaki.
When the final version was ready for release, Master decided to create a video for the track. “I’d decided that this song was too good to just have a recording and tell people to listen to this song, because personally I don’t even listen to songs when people send me links. It’s a bit hard to just listen to a song when someone asks you to, so I thought, ‘I have to make a video so people will listen.’”
Shortly after he uploaded the animation on Facebook, it received more than 500 views.
“It’s nice to see people enjoying it without me asking them to. This time people would just share it without me asking,” he says.
As well as using YouTube to spread his music, Master is also relishing the convenience of DropBox, an online sharing site that allowed both him and his brother to work on the production of I Won’t Burn despite being states apart; the technological advancements that have allowed him to record in his home recording studio; and the importance of iTunes in allowing individual singles to be released instead of requiring artists to have produced a whole album of music before putting it out into the public domain.
With his 21st century approach to recording and selling his music, it’s no surprise that Master compares writing a song to writing a status update on Facebook. “The problem with today’s technology is that sometimes I’ll think of a status update instead of a song. That’s what songwriting is, it’s like you’ve got a status update and you want everyone to know about it; it’s the same sort of concept, but the difference is you write a song about it.”
In the flesh, Master can be seen on stage at several up-coming shows in the region. In late October he’s playing two main slots at the Tablelands Folk Festival, but before that he’ll be headlining the Sunset Music Festival at Rex Smeal Park on October 12th.
“I’ve played there before, but [this year] it’ll be the first time I’ll be prepared to play, with rehearsals,” he laughs, “I love playing live, it keeps me motivated, keeps me happy. If I don’t play live, I get down."
And crowds at the festival are in for a great show. Despite his current sound, which he describes as “pop acoustic with a rock edge”, Master says he still likes to pick up his electric guitar and “rock out”.
And he promises he will be doing guitar, rocking out and getting people up and dancing in a months’ time.
What: Sunset Music Festival
Where: Rex Smeal Park, Port Douglas
When: Saturday, October 12, 2013
Tickets: http://www.trybooking.com/Booking/BookingEventSummary.aspx?eid=62187
