SYDNEY, AUS (CelebrityAccess) – Influential Australian music press pioneer, Anthony O’Grady, has passed away in Sydney following a series of medical complications. He was 71.
O’Grady, who was the co-founder of The Music Network (TMN) and Rock Australian Magazine (RAM), began his career as an ad copywriter in the early 1970s.
While he dabbled early on in writing and editing for music publications such as Go-Set, Soundblast, and the shortlived Ear For Music, it was in 1975, during a great boom in Australian music, that O’Grady formed RAM and set out to turn it into a benchmark of high-quality free-form New Journalism.
With the help of well known counter-culture writers like Jen Jewel Brown and Peter Olszewski, as well as new up-and-coming writers such as Andrew McMillan, Annie Burton, Richard Guilliatt, Greg Taylor, and Stuart Coupe, who all called the publication home, he achieved that dream.
Many years later in 1994, O’Grady along with artist managers/music publishers John Woodruff and Keith Welsh set up The Music Network. Initially intended as a print-only tip sheet for the radio and music industries, TMN has since grown into one of the country’s foremost daily digital music news sources.
O’Grady is survived by his son Troy and daughter Cordelia.
