This was big. This was bigger than big. This was without question the biggest rock music festival ever to hit Australia. Over 70,000 rock fans made way to Sydney Olympic Park on Sunday for the annual Soundwave Festival, this year headlined by Metallica and featuring a lineup as impressive as any one day event you'd see anywhere in the world.

On Wednesday night, Triple J breakfast co-host Tom Ballard filled the Rhino Room with his notorious cheeky humour. My Ego is Bigger than Your Ego, a feature of the Adelaide Fringe Festival, is a trip down memory lane of sorts, enlightening audiences with tales of his life-long quest for attention.

Founded in 1999, the concept of All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) is simple: a brand of music festivals which provide an alternative, counter-culture to your typical festival. ATP is a musical celebration which takes classic rock bands and lets them curate an entire line-up, allowing the punter to expand their music taste, and/or witness bands they never thought they’d ever get to see; bands which have been vetted by their favourite musicians.

The St Kilda Festival is a relevant piece of history as well as merriment and pleasure. Each year sparkles newsworthy debates that it will end but these scares disappear in a blink of an eye and any wonder, the festival attracted 400,000 revelers in 2013 alone. Bottle shops no doubt do a roaring trade (although IGA is, one could say, smart and didn't sell alcohol on the day due to liquor rules for the festival) as does the local weekly market and not to forget the other market stalls placed around St Kilda promulgating their wares (Wild Seed and XVI just to name a couple great clothing stalls).

Well that’s it. The last Laneway Festival of the year has come and gone. The festivals run of shows came to a sweltering sold-out climax at Perth’s Cultural precinct. Looking at the line-up (Of Monsters and Men & The Reubens in particular) it’s hardly surprising that Perth along with a number of the other dates sold out. Though despite it’s sold out status, it felt fairly quiet until the majority of the punters arrived a couple of hours into the day.

The St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival has never been a niche festival, no matter how indie or decidedly ‘hipster’ its appearance purports. Having featured acts including Florence and the Machine, Foals, Two Door Cinema Club and more over the years, Laneway has always been one of the country’s best touring festivals that has continued to grow in popularity since its debut tour. This year is my third Laneway Festival and I gathered that, since the Adelaide leg sold out so close to the date (a miracle), things were going to be big down the city’s west end.

Far from the laneways it originated in, the boutique St Jerome's Laneway Festival is now a three country, seven city touring juggernaut, with huge crowds and unthinkable logistics. And though it still attracts the fringe acts that gave it its idealic indie reputation in its early days, it also attracts (or, rather, predicts) bands who litter the triple j Hottest 100, proving they are as much on the pulse of the "what's hot now" mainstream as the next festival, if not moreso. With this including electronic artists like Flume (this year) and SBTRKT (last year), this also sees a much more diverse crowd coming into the grounds than one might have a few years ago. Does this mean the festival has changed? Definitely. After all, the crowd is as much of a festival as the acts and its surroundings. But does that mean the festival is any less enjoyable for a fan of the Laneways of the past? Well, let's a look...

Saturday January 19 saw the Devil's Kitchen Music Festival roll on in to Brisbane and they brought with them a slew of great Australian talent to showcase at the aptly chosen venue The Beetle Bar.

Boasting names such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Killers, Animal Collective and Foals it was clear that the Big Day Out had bounced back from the bad run it had last year where half the tour got truncated versions of the event. This year, every show boasted the full lineup which was promising for the future of the event given the recent hurdles it has had to overcome.

The Fourth Annual Jazzgroove Summer Festival in Surry Hills and Redfern was held on 17th - 20th January 2013, with some pretty awesome jazz music heard throughout the weekend. The AU review tagged along to check out as much of the festival as possible!

There was a definite change of mood about the Showgrounds this year. It’s obvious upon one’s first scout about the festival site that the Big Day Out just doesn’t function properly in the stripped back capacity it did last year. With both main stages back in action, the El Jimador wrestling ring and Chow Town being new shiny drawcards for punters and the sheer force of the line-up this year, the Big Day Out experience people will buy tickets for actually seemed to be in operation for this, the 2013 edition.

Sugar Mountain Festival - not your ordinary summer event. A summit of music and arts, a sensory splendour, a conglomeration of creative culture. The AU was there to see, hear, and report from the floor.

The sparse interior of the City Recital Hall at Angel Place was given an auditory injection of life during Rokia Traoré’s stunning showcase of traditional West African classics that focused mainly on her own Malian heritage.