Ella Karsai

Ella Karsai is a Sydney-based writer who has been orbiting music and media since she was 17, when she cut her teeth in internet radio and discovered that people would, apparently, pay her to talk into microphones.

That early start took her through work experience at Nova 96.9 and Foxtel Studios before she landed an entry-level radio hosting and production role at 2GB Digital. She later contributed to street press and music publications before making the unlikely decision to spend several years studying politics, international relations and environmental humanities.

Unlike her film degree, the detour proved useful. Ella went on to work in policy and research, developing a research-driven approach to understanding industries, regulation, technology and the social forces shaping them. She now brings that lens back to music journalism, writing about the people, ideas and machinery behind contemporary music and culture.

Ella has been going to gigs for about as long as she has been skateboarding, which is to say long enough to have accumulated an alarming number of opinions about both. Her musical tastes are similarly difficult to contain, spanning a frankly unreasonable range of genres, artists and eras.

A lifelong skateboarding scumbag, former radio rat and unapologetic music tragic, Ella is interested in the stories that sit beyond the press release: how the industry is evolving, how technology is changing creative work and the artists, communities and audiences keeping music culture alive.