Jane Gazzo, presenter of The Sound, has been hosting the ABC show from her home.

What were the highlights for you of the first season?

Interviewing Kylie from London over Zoom to talk about her new album, that was really special. And some of the co-hosts we had, like Russell Crowe, and Bryan Brown in the first episode and it turned out he knew Lime Cordiale really well, he'd watched them grow up. But then there were some of the performances you won't forget in a hurry. I'm talking about Tones and I singing Never Seen The Rain and it literally does rain that was never in the script, it just started raining in the last take we did for her. Bliss n Eso performing live on Centrepoint Tower: that was just crazy. Amy Shark in the Bennelong restaurant at Sydney Opera House; she had this Australian choir behind her and it just looked beautiful. They're some of the things that spring to mind.

You've been in the business a while now do you ever still get starstruck by the people you get to meet?

I'm not sure if it's "starstruck", but I do get a certain nervousness before a big interview. Certainly with Kylie I was really nervous and I didn't want to stuff that one up. Luckily I didn't ... but yeah, those thoughts go through my head along the lines of, "Will they like me? Will they warm to me? What's the first question I need to ask here?" I always think of those things.

How do you deal with people who might be starstruck talking to you?

Oh, I don't think they're starstruck when they talk to me.

Well I'll have to disagree with you there. Youre a big deal.

Yes, I'm a big deal in my living room. My kids think I'm a big deal.

It is the year 2020: at this point in history, is music still good?

Music's better. We're not confined to our garages anymore. It's not just about kids playing in their garages and forming bands with their mates anymore, it's about the kid who's a loner in his bedroom working on sounds, uploading them to YouTube or Spotify or Bandcamp. It's the making of the bedroom DJ and the bedroom musician. It's been a decade of collaboration, too, where once collaborations were not that common, now you look at the charts and it's such-and-such featuring with such-and-such. Collaborations have come to the fore and a lot of artists talk about collaborating very early on in their careers now where once they would probably hone their craft a little bit more, back in the day.

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So it's a more open field.

I think there are so many more avenues and so many more ways now to get your music heard. Is that a good or a bad thing? It's neither, it just is. A lot of artists talk about the frustration of trying to get heard, but I think it's still about the song. It's always been about the song. As long as there's a good song, I think it will get heard amongst all the avenues there are.

As I get older, I find it harder to stay aware of what's current in music. Is that a challenge for you?

Not so much a challenge, only because I have young kids, and also I lecture at the Australian College of the Arts I teach music industry, and every week I ask my students what they're listening to and they keep me across a lot of stuff. I still listen to radio, that's still my first port of call; that's something that's ingrained in me. I started out listening to community radio, that's how I discovered bands, and I still go to radio. I'm still grateful we have community radio in Melbourne, PBS is probably my go-to. And with The Sound as well, I'm inundated with new music.

How important is a show like The Sound to the Australian music industry?

I don't think we can underestimate how important it is to have an Australian music television show on free-to-air. We haven't had that before The Sound for a long, long time. When we look back on 2020, historically and musically, how will we know what's happening? I think what The Sound has achieved is it's not only highlighting our emerging talent and established talent, it's documenting this period. I think that's really important, because as a music lover I go back to Recovery and Countdown and Sounds and Video Hits, and it's always wonderful to look at those YouTube clips and see what we were listening to back then. I think it's been really important to document 2020, because it's been such an unusual and challenging year for our arts and music industry. But also, for many of those artists it was their first time ever on television, so these are really special moments not only for the artists but also for the viewers who get to meet these artists.

Season 2 of The Sound airs on ABC on November 1.

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'I'm a big deal in my living room': Jane Gazzo talks radio, TV and the future of music - Sydney Morning Herald