TMRW Music’s April Chart Sweep Shows How Australian Dance Got Its Momentum

SYDNEY, Australia — In a country where country has been getting fresh attention, pop keeps its grip and rock still hangs on, dance music is the genre doing the real heavy lifting. That’s not just a feeling. According to Soundcheck, Creative Australia’s late-2024 snapshot of the sector, roughly one in four of Australia’s festivals during the warmer months are built around dance music, making it the most common genre on the festival circuit.

The same pattern holds online. The IMS Business Report ranked Australia as the third-largest electronic music market in the world, behind only the United States and Germany, and said Australians stream more of the genre per capita than anywhere else. Spotify added another marker last year when it said Aussie dance tracks were streamed more than 1 billion times globally in a single month, underlining just how exportable the country’s club ecosystem has become.

At the center of that surge is TMRW Music, the Sydney-based group behind etcetc, which had a striking week in April. The company accounted for 60% of the tracks on ARIA’s Top Australian Dance Singles Chart, with four entries from FISHER including “Favour,” his collaboration with Tones And I, which landed at No. 3. Also in the mix were Dom Dolla’s remix of Puretone’s “Addicted To Bass” at No. 4 and Yes Boone’s “All I Really Want” at No. 7. All six of those tracks also showed up in the broader Top 20 Australian Singles Chart.

The spillover wasn’t confined to Australia. Two of those TMRW releases also crossed over to the UK’s Music Week Club Chart: Supafly & Greg Stainer’s “Girls” featuring Ca$h X at No. 16, and Jessi Lowkey x Cristiano Fry’s “I Know” at No. 20.

FISHER’s week got another marker of commercial muscle on April 22, when he received the highest-selling single award for “Stay” in his hometown. And the pipeline hardly looks dry. PNAU, the Sydney duo of Nick Littlemore and Peter Mayes, are set to release their new album AHHCade on July 31 via etcetc worldwide. The record includes “Tu Corazon,” a single that arrived earlier with Mexican sister act The Warning, and it comes with a decent amount of context behind it: PNAU’s 2012 Elton John collaboration Good Morning to the Night hit No. 1 on the Official U.K. Albums Chart, and they repeated that feat in 2021 with the global chart-topping remix of “Cold Heart” featuring Dua Lipa.

To get a clearer read on the numbers and the machinery behind them, Billboard spoke with TMRW Music Group CEO Tim McGee, etcetc Music general manager Aden Mullens, TMRW Music Group head of A&R Chris Fraser and senior marketing manager Lana Howlett.

Asked why Australian dance music seems to be breaking through more loudly now, Mullens framed it as a genre that has finally been absorbed into the mainstream, not just domestically but globally.

Dance music has become recognized and accepted as part of the mainstream globally. It’s now a multigenerational and multilingual genre, which has had a compounding effect on consumption.

Howlett pointed to the way Australian artists are building communities around the music, and to the digital platforms that help that local energy travel further than it used to.

The Australian dance acts that are breaking through are not only incredibly talented, they understand how to build culture around their music in a way that feels distinctly local, uplifting, authentic and community-driven. As online platforms such as TikTok, Discord and Twitch amplify these communities, that spirit is reaching the masses in a way we, as an isolated country, weren’t previously able to. That’s now turning connection into momentum.

Fraser was more blunt about the longer view: this hasn’t arrived out of nowhere. In his telling, dance has always had strength in Australia, even when the wider industry wasn’t paying enough attention. The difference now is that the ecosystem has finally had enough time, and enough support, to turn consistency into visible chart results. He also pointed out that the Australian market is not especially forgiving, which makes sustained wins more meaningful than isolated spikes. Local DSP support, he said, has helped projects move domestically and abroad.

That idea of earned traction comes up again when Fraser talks about why TMRW had such a dominant week. Puretone’s “Addicted To Bass” was one of the more obvious examples. The label had been talking with the act for years about reviving it, and Dom Dolla’s version started as a bootleg he made for his own stadium show in Sydney.

That organic origin gave the record something you can’t manufacture. Luckily, the timing lined up, and working with Dom and [manager] James Fava and the team to bring it to a proper release was one of the most creatively rewarding experiences we’ve had as a team in a long time.

He added that the song’s endurance made the response easier to understand. “It was a special record 28 years ago,” Fraser said, and Dolla’s update gave it “new life.”

I don’t know if any other artist would have committed as hard as he did to the brilliant bass/fish angle seen in the music video.

Yes Boone’s rise, meanwhile, was presented as the opposite of overnight success. Fraser described it as three and a half years of patient development, with the label helping him build a community before the record arrived at the right moment. He credited Australian radio for backing the song through summer and noted how rare it is to see commercial radio and triple j moving in lockstep behind a new artist.

It’s not often you’ll see commercial radio championing a new artist in lock step with triple j, so to see that belief from day one is a moment we don’t take for granted.

That momentum has now started to travel internationally, something the label is actively trying to extend. Fraser also said the broader environment for Australian artists is in better shape than it has been for some time, helped by institutional support from bodies like Creative Australia.

Mullens said the wider TMRW operation is running at full pace: sell-out Ministry of Sound shows around the country, more than 150 unique tours in 2025 and 200-plus releases. For a company that works across recordings, events, publishing, management and agency business, that kind of scale matters, especially in a market where old pathways are less reliable than they used to be.

So where does a chart run like this sit in the label’s history? Fraser said they haven’t seen this many distinct tracks converge near the top at once before. But he was careful to frame it less as a miracle than as the result of an operation that can finally handle the workload.

A few years ago, we might have had the music but not the capacity to maximize it. Right now we have both, and that feels like a meaningful difference.

McGee, looking at the independent sector more broadly, said the Australian landscape has changed dramatically over his 25 years in it, even as the basic pressure on indie labels has remained familiar. Electronic music, he argued, has proven especially durable because it keeps adapting, keeps finding new routes to listeners and keeps building its own infrastructure when traditional support dries up.

He also drew a line between the dance chart and the broader singles chart, saying the latter does not always reflect the depth of local talent. Festivals, events and local scenes, he suggested, are often where the strongest moments happen first. TMRW, in his view, has survived by not depending solely on radio or media shifts, instead leaning on its own ecosystem across recordings, agency, events, publishing and management.

There’s still more coming. McGee named Djanaba, Carter Walsh, Sumner and Alexa Leary among the artists the company is building with, describing them as projects with genuine global potential.