Glenn A. Baker — music historian, author, broadcaster and Billboard's long-time Australia correspondent — died on the morning of Friday, 31 July 2026, at the age of 74. He had celebrated his birthday three days earlier. His son, Orson Baker, told Billboard that his father had been in decline following a period of illness and had suffered a stroke.

An official family statement described Baker as a loving father of six and grandfather of thirteen. He was born in Sydney on 28 July 1952, the eldest of four children, and left school at fifteen to help support his family. The spark, as he often told it, came from seeing the Beatles on television — a moment that set the course for a career spanning records, radio, publishing and live performance management.

Baker's radio career began in the mid-1970s as part of a research team whose work led to the creation of 2JJ, the Sydney station that grew into triple j, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's national youth network. He managed the Australian band Ol'55 and, in 1979, co-founded Raven Records, an independent Australian label. He wrote 17 books and contributed sleeve notes — the essays printed on album covers and inserts — to more than 600 releases. His byline appeared in Billboard for over twenty years as the magazine's Australia correspondent.

His reputation as a walking encyclopaedia of popular music was not just colloquial. Baker won the BBC's Rock Brain of the Universe competition three times during the 1980s, a quiz format that tested depth of knowledge across decades and genres. He also won the Australian Travel Writer of the Year Award twice, in 1995 and 2000. The Sydney Morning Herald described him as a rock music journalist, collector, commentator, author and broadcaster; the ABC called him a music journalist, historian and broadcaster. He was also known, across Australian media, for his distinctive headwear.

Cold Chisel frontman Jimmy Barnes recalled that Baker sent him the Easybeats song "Good Times" when Barnes was looking for material to record with INXS — a small gesture with a long tail, since the resulting collaboration became one of the most recognisable Australian rock recordings of its era. Baker's instinct for connecting a song to the right artist at the right moment was, by the accounts of those who worked with him, central to how he operated.

In 2024, Baker auctioned his personal record collection — over 80,000 items, including more than 50,000 LPs — through Lloyds Auctions. The buyer was Paul Lambess, founder and director of the Winarch Group. The sale represented a working library accumulated across five decades, not a trophy shelf: research material for books, sleeve notes and the broadcasts that made him a fixture of Australian music journalism.

For a correspondent whose beat was the whole of the business, Baker's own story ran through nearly every layer of it — artist management, independent labels, national radio, print journalism, catalogue and collecting. He reported from Australia for an international readership, and the trade publication that carried his work for two decades has now confirmed his death. Billboard